


The Singer And The Song

by JuniperJones



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Dean/Cas Reverse Bang, Fantasy AU, M/M, Magic, Merman Castiel; Merman Dean, Some fish were harmed in the writing of this fic., Soulmates, Spells & Enchantments
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-10
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:59:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 54,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23065117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JuniperJones/pseuds/JuniperJones
Summary: "Do you know what this is?” his mother asked Castiel, when he was eleven years old. “This is a Destiny stone. I was gifted it as a child and told it would lead me to my inevitable Destiny.  That, when I reached maturity, it would flare to life, burning like a star, telling me I must leave my home and swim into the ocean alone and, if I followed its call and followed it true, it would write the song of my life and show me the way I must follow to find my true mate. And do you know what I did? ... I left my home and my family, left all that I loved and held dear, and ventured out into the unknown, afraid and alone. But I was brave and I followed the path shown to me, until I eventually came here and found your father. And then I put the necklace away, knowing my song was sung and the time would come when I would pass it to the chosen one of the next generation."But Castiel’s heart had been stolen already, when an act of rebellion led to a chance encounter that had changed his life forever.How could his Destiny truly lie thousands of miles from Atlan, if by fulfilling it he left his broken heart behind in the care of a wild, green-eyed, red-tailed, hellion named Dean?Art by Supernatastic
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 32
Kudos: 149
Collections: Dean/Cas Reverse Bang 2020





	1. Prologue: The Song of all things.

_Before time, before sea, before land, there was Pontus, who lived alone on a world formed of fire and cloaked in water._

_As eons passed, the fire at the center of the world boiled and bubbled, erupting into the water and solidifying into swells that became hills. Then the hills became mountains and then the mountains became land and so the water between the land became the seas and the oceans. And with the land came the birth of Gaia, a consort for Pontus, and together they spun a web of magic around the world and, as that magic touched those primordial waters, the first mortal life was sparked into existence. The seas filled with a myriad of tiny identical beings that floated through the Oceans like specks of sunlight._

_And then Pontus took those spawnings and breathed a little of his magic into them. He sprinkled them with potential, the ability to transform themselves into a choice of a hundred thousand different species. The algae and the plankton, the molluscs and the shellfish, the urchins and the snails, the eels and the rays, the fish and the seals, the dolphins and the whales, the octopus and the squid, the skates and the sharks and, finally, he offered them the choice of becoming his most perfect work, the mansfish. A creature designed to be the caretaker of all. A position that carried such responsibility that he knew few would even strive to achieve it._

_Into all creatures, from the tiniest to the leviathan, Gaia also breathed a little magic, just enough to give them the capacity to dream. Yet only the mansfish were gifted the ability to create songs of destiny because it was they who were charged with the care of all other creatures and the preservation of the environment in which they dwelled._

_With the passing of millennia, the primordial spawnings gradually made their choices and evolved. The seas filled with hundreds of millions of marine creatures, and, reigning over them were the mansfish, who were responsible for weaving a song of harmony between all of the denizens of the sea._

_But all too soon, Pontus discovered he had erred. In offering his children a choice, he had created a situation in which far too many of those who had strived to become mansfish had not been driven by the desire to protect after all. Most had simply grasped greedily for the power to subjugate the other species to their will. The songs they sang were discordant and bitter and selfish and harmful to all._

_So Pontus collected the mansfish and divided them into two. On one side he set those few he found to be Mer: good, kind and righteous guardians of the sea. On the other he set the majority, those he found to be Hu: greedy and avaricious and selfish._

_Pontus declared that the Hu were monsters and passed judgement that they should be destroyed. But Gaia pleaded with her mate to spare the lives of these most wicked of their children. She said they were just younglings still, that they might yet evolve into something better if allowed to live long enough to gain wisdom._

_Merciful Pontus listened to her pleas and said that, if she was willing to take responsibility for the monsters, they could live. But they must be exiled from his own realm and become land monsters, Humans, and live in Gaia’s domain for ever after._

_So that was how the Land Monsters, the Humans, were created. Pontus cast them out of the sea, onto the land, where their tails withered and were replaced by legs, and their gills rotted away until they could only breathe air, and though the seas call to them constantly, luring them with promises of home, Land Monsters can now only dream of the days they sang and danced under the waves._

_In the depths of the Oceans, only the Mer remain and thrive as guardians of the deep and the beloved of Pontus; but their existence has been forgotten entirely by their exiled brethren. In the memories of the Hu, the Mer have become nothing more than creatures of myth and legend._

  
  



	2. The Singer And The Song : Part One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Art by the wonderful Supernatastic 101. Beta by the amazingly patient Captainhaterade.

**_“Life, he realized, was much like a song. In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it’s in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile.” - Nicholas Sparks_ **

**“ _Science is magic that works_ ”- _Kurt Vonnegut_**

Castiel was five years old when he first met the Sea Witch.

Well, that’s not strictly true, but he had been just ten days old on the sole previous occasion he’d met her. Since their previous meeting had been on the day she’d performed his formal naming ceremony, it’s hardly surprising he didn’t recall her appearance.

And so his first true impression of Rowena was that of fire.

Not just because of the flaming color of her rioting hair which was, in itself, so anomalous and strange that it stole his breath. The kingdom of Atlan was a place of calm, muted hues and he had never before even conceived of such a color as ‘red’.

But also because it was his first vision of real fire; of a torch that burned with a seemingly eternal, unwavering flame in the heart of her cave of magical wonders, casting its illumination wide through a cavern filled with the treasure of a thousand ages. Boxes and trunks stuffed full of trinkets retrieved from the wrecks of multitudinous Land Monster vessels. Deep ledges carved into the rough rock walls that spilled with an overflowing abundance of maps and parchment, slates and tablets and even books of fine construction formed from exotic, mystical Land Monster substances apparently named ‘paper’ and ‘leather’.

Castiel had never seen such a vast display of casual wealth.

He had seen gold and gems and fantastical shells collected from every corner of the world. He had seen jewelry and opulent furnishings and intricately carved statues and even weapons inlaid with the most precious of stones. But he had never before seen such a collection of what he truly considered riches.

 _Knowledge_.

Because even at five years of age, Castiel had determined that nothing was more valuable than understanding the intricate building blocks that formed his world.

But its contents were not the only magic within the Sea Witch’s cave. Its very presence was an inexplicable mystery.

Although it was located deeply within the ocean, right in the heart of his father’s city, entering the cave was like breaching the surface of the ocean above because the cave’s environs were completely dry. Not even in the same way as the rare other waterless spaces within the city, since it lacked even the slightest tang of salt air. Nobody knew how the Sea Witch replenished her own air supply, or even from whence the air came, and yet the domain of the Sea Witch was so arid and dry that it caused his gills to flutter and retract, forcing his still only half-formed lungs to struggle to compensate, as though he were stranded on a sandy, distant shore like a beached whale-calf.

The sensation was terrifying, thrilling, and irresistible.

When he boldly entered, uninvited, swimming up from below, through a narrow entrance into a huge air pocket that protected the delicate Land Monster artifacts from the destructive elements of the sea, the air wasn’t damp and salty and stale as it was in the palace’s archive, where ancient tomes created from materials unsuited to water gradually perished with the rot of age, despite all efforts to preserve them.

He knew the air for the other ‘dry’ rooms of the city was ferried down from the surface inside huge inflated whale bladders, a process so time consuming and labor-intensive that it was only rarely replenished and, so, free access to the dry rooms was strictly limited to the King himself. Even as a Prince of Atlan, Castiel had never been allowed inside those hallowed halls except under the strict supervision of his tutors. And even then, he had been allowed only to look rather than touch. Under those circumstances, the dry rooms had quickly lost their allure to such a young pup. Bad enough that moving and breathing within them was problematic at best. Without the pay-off of unrestricted access to the unique tomes of wisdom they contained, their attraction had faded swiftly.

In contrast, the Sea Witch’s cave was not formally listed as a ‘forbidden’ place. She had always relied merely on fear of the unknown to guard the sanctity of her treasures. Fear had always served her well enough in the past. Her reputation had always been a more-than-sufficient deterrent to all the other Mer who lived in the Inner Palace.

Except, apparently, Castiel.

It wasn’t that Castiel was particularly brave. At least he didn’t think he was. Prince Castiel was, however, exceedingly, insatiably, drawn to knowledge (perhaps an inheritance from his almost-permanently-absent father, a Mer who neglected his Royal duties entirely to spend literal months at a time buried away with his books instead of managing his realm). The Sea Witch was, reputedly, the hoarder of vast amounts of knowledge, so Castiel thought it was perfectly natural behavior to ignore all the rumor and speculation and make his way to her cave, drawn like prey towards its irresistible allure.

Precociously eager, intrigued, and insatiably curious, he didn’t even pause to introduce himself before he demanded she explain the phenomenon of its existence to him.

And Rowena, more used to instilling fear in the citizens of Atlan than garnering their fascination, found herself unexpectedly charmed by the bold cheek of the tiny Merpup. Her eyes sparkled with laughter that the youngling would not only breach her domain without invitation, but then solemnly demand explanations rather than proffer apologies.

“It’s magic,” she told him.

And, blue eyes wide with wonder, five-year-old Castiel fully believed it to be so.

**xxxx**

Castiel was six years old when he first discovered the map that eventually changed everything.

Buried deep within the Sea Witch’s cave, lost and abandoned with dozens of other forgotten treasures, the parchment was faded with age and barely legible. But under the fierce glow of Rowena’s torch of magical fire, it was possible to trace the lines painstakingly etched by some Mer eons dead.

“I don’t understand,” he told Rowena when he showed her the treasure he’d found. “This speaks of a volcano creating this City we dwell in, but how can this be true? I believed Atlan to be thousands of miles from such phenomena.”

The Sea Witch smiled at him fondly. She alone found it easy to navigate the disparity between his precocious intelligence and the limitations of his age and experience.

“Well, dearie, that is true now. But nothing is set in stone. Not even stone is set in stone. Heh. Heh. Once, the whole world was nothing but volcanoes. This place we live in is, I suppose, simply the corpse of one of those volcanoes. These caves and caverns, and the tunnels on your map, are what was left behind when the lava finally cooled. Think of it like the empty shell of a dead Sea Turtle.”

“The world was all volcanoes? But the volcanoes are Gaia’s domain. I read that before Gaia was born, Pontus ruled over a world formed purely of water,” he argued.

“Whilst reading is important, you need to learn the difference between allegory and fact, dearie. Trust me, the world was spawned in fire, not in water.”

“I see,” Castiel said, his brows so furrowed with intense thought that for a moment she had a vision of how he might look as an adult. “So where did the sea come from, then?”

“Magic,” she told him, casually, which was her normal answer for anything she was unsure of or simply wished not to discuss at length. An answer that had, for many months, managed to instantly quell the pup’s insatiable questions. Well, for an hour or so, at least.

But at six years old, Castiel experienced, for the first time, the sensation of strong and immediate dissatisfaction with that glib answer.

“So where did the magic come from?” he demanded.

And Rowena sighed and decided perhaps it was already time to move the pup’s studies towards science, after all.

**xxxx**

It wasn’t fair, Castiel decided one day when he was seven years old.

He missed his mother terribly.

As the Queen of the Realm, she had always been genuinely busy with her Royal duties (particularly since his father rarely, if ever, showed his face in public), but she had still always made a point of making time in her day to spend at least an hour or so with him. And even if, of necessity, Castiel sometimes spent that hour just swimming beside her as quietly as a shadow while she visited with the various denizens of the Inner Court, dealing with minor disputes or making necessary decisions regarding such mundanity as housing or supplies, still, those times felt precious to him and consequently he, for a brief time, felt less like a ghost.

Of late, he was lucky to see her once or twice weekly.

She was frail, he was told. Exhausted. Sickly. Far too unwell to handle the excitability of a young pup.

Despite Castiel being certain he was the living antonym of ‘excitable’, his pleas to visit with her more often had fallen on deaf ears and so his already-woefully-lonely existence had become exponentially worse.

He was so bored that he was seriously contemplating screaming out loud and thus shattering the bubble of invisibility that apparently surrounded him. It had been hours since he’d been brusquely told by one of the servants of the Inner Court that he should just sit in a corner with a reading tablet and keep himself occupied ‘like a good pup’.

The idea of making an unholy racket was actually an amusing thought, considering he was normally as quiet and unnoticeable as a barnacle. He imagined he’d probably give everyone present a heart-attack if he made any noise whatsoever, since they’d all obviously forgotten he even existed. He was, he decided fancifully, perhaps just a ghost, after all. Like the specters he’d read of in Rowena’s tomes, those spirits of dead Land Monsters that apparently haunted old ship wrecks: invisible, unseen and unheard.

Not that being ignored was a new sensation. He was used to being told to stay out of the way. People in the palace were always so busy. Everyone seemed to have roles of great importance that stole all of their time and attention. Though, when he was feeling particularly resentful of his own solitude, he often suspected the Mer who lived in the Inner Court gained most of their personal satisfaction from simply appearing to be terribly busy.

Perhaps just to avoid speaking with him, he thought sulkily.

He wasn’t a sulky pup by nature but he was very lonely. And nobody seemed to care about his loneliness even if, admittedly, no one was ever actually unkind to him.

The servants were respectful but distant. The lower Royals were polite to a fault, should they find themselves in a situation where interacting with him was unavoidable. His tutors, though capable and always willing to answer his questions with well-considered answers, were reserved and formal with him and they were always precisely careful never to cross the boundary between polite and familiar.

No-one ever deliberately sought his company and he rarely garnered more than the odd, off-handed ruffling of his hair or a “what’s up, little pup?” from one of his siblings as they swam by him, so focused on their ‘important business’ that he doubted they’d hear an answer even if he had opportunity to offer one.

But usually he could at least waste a few hours of his day in the cave of the Sea Witch.

Not on that particular day, though. Rowena, like everyone else, was too busy preparing for Michael’s much-vaunted mating day celebration. Michael’s intended mate, Hannah, was not a true mate—a distinction that caused much gleeful palace gossip but made absolutely no sense whatsoever to Castiel. Michael was now of an age when it was obvious to all citizens of Atlan that no seeking Prince or Princess would ever arrive from some distant city to claim him for their own, and so he had chosen a mate with his heart rather than leaving his fortune to fate. This was, Castiel heard, a sad and highly unfortunate situation.

Which confused Castiel greatly, considering the amount of excited effort that was taking place to ensure Michael and Hannah’s mating ceremony was celebrated with much pomp and circumstance.

Still, the fact that Michael was his oldest sibling and thus the one expected to eventually inherit the throne was probably the reason everyone was acting as though any error in the preparations would be the end of the world.

Sick and tired of being totally overlooked, Castiel decided it was finally time for him to discover whether the lava tunnels marked on Rowena’s ancient map still offered a route that would take him outside of the palace.

It wasn’t an act of deliberate attention-seeking ‘rebellion’. He certainly was not intending to make any ‘statement’ by breaking the rules so flagrantly. He wasn’t planning on ‘running away’ like a spoiled brat, simply to elicit a response.

He just wanted to find somewhere quiet. Where he could be alone. Because he was oddly sure that being solitary by deliberate choice would feel far less lonely than the terrible isolation of being present and yet invisible within a crowd.

Although, it must be said that he did feel a certain amount of bitter justification for his actions.

Because although he knew he wasn’t supposed to ever leave the palace by himself, he decided that if nobody noticed him leaving then the failing was surely as much on them for allowing it to happen as it was on himself for doing so.

Even so, his heart was in his mouth as he snuck off to one of the secret exits marked on the map, a tiny, dark hole deeply recessed inside a far corner of a rarely used corridor, one everybody else had apparently dismissed as nothing more than a flaw in the rough cave construction. As he slipped into the tunnel and began to swim down its winding length, he wasn’t sure what he was more afraid of—that some monster would be lurking in the tunnel to eat him, or that someone would catch him in his act of defiance and haul him back to the palace in disgrace.

Neither happened.

The tunnel, although winding and long, simply led him swiftly and surely to a cave opening at the base of the mountain-side that formed Atlan’s City wall. Far above him, so far that the people seemed as small as minnows, he could see Mer swimming in and out of the official Palace entrance, could see the Guards hovering to check and challenge all who came and went from the City, but so far below them, where the water was uncomfortably cold, Castiel found himself truly alone for the first time in his life.

And he discovered he’d been right.

It was better to be alone by choice than simply ignored.

Even so, the thrill of being outside was still dampened by the sadness of his loneliness. He still wished he had someone, anyone, to share the adventure with.

But, as Rowena was always so fond of saying, if wishing something simply made it so, there would be no place left in the world for Magic.

Several months later, when his excursions outside of the palace had become almost a daily occurrence, Castiel wondered why he’d ever hesitated to enter the tunnel that first day. Why he’d ever imagined he might be pursued at all.

Because, no matter how often he left or how long he stayed away, no one ever noticed he was gone.

Which was, he decided, even at the tender age of seven, not really a good thing to realize about your own existence.

**xxxx**

He was eight years old before someone discovered his habit of regularly sneaking out of the palace and sitting quietly inside one of the carcasses of downed ships that littered the seabed around Atlan.

He was measuring barnacles, making quick, scratched notes on a flat stone as to changes of their size and spread pattern since his last visit. It was neither the most exciting nor the most useful way to spend his alone time, but it was a quiet and soothing pursuit and Rowena had told him that the study of even the tiniest, most basic forms of life was a critical stepping stone to understanding more complex ones such as people. To understand science, she said, one had to develop a scientific mind.

He was so intent on his task that he didn’t even notice the approach of the other Mer until he spoke.

“Why are you hiding here? My dad said this is an old Land Monster coffin. Is it still full of dead Land Monsters? Huh… actually, that sounds kinda cool. Can I come in and see?”

Castiel startled, his gills fluttering with alarm at the unexpected voice. He looked up to see an unfamiliar Merpup leaning his face into the ragged hull breach that was Castiel’s entrance into the rotting wooden ship, and was immediately captivated by the boy’s bizarrely colored eyes. They were a startling shade of green—not the dark green of kelp or even that of the saxifrage he’d witnessed on the single occasion he’d been permitted to venture with Gabriel to the edge of their father’s realm that lay nearest the craggy shoreline of the world of the Land Monsters. The pup’s eyes were more the vibrant color of a Giant Green Anemone.

Castiel had never seen anything as exotic and strange.

To tell the truth, he’d never seen a Giant Green Anemone, either, but he had seen an illustration of one in the ramshackle library of Rowena, the Sea Witch, and even then had found himself doubting the color could have been a true representation because the world of his experience was woven from a palate of cool blues and delicate lavender, silvery grays and silken violets.

The whole realm of Atlan was formed of calm, harmonious hues. Well, except for Rowena’s hair, of course.

“I’m six. But I’m nearly seven. That’s almost eight and my dad says I can go huntin’ with him when I’m eight, so that means I’m nearly growed already,” the boy announced with excited confidence. “So then I’ll be too busy huntin’ and fightin’ to look at dead monsters. So probably best to do it now, don’tcha think?”

Castiel blinked at the boy-pup slowly. He couldn’t recall when anyone other than Rowena had offered so many words in his direction simultaneously. None of the servants spoke to him at all if they could avoid it, his siblings still rarely did more than absently pat him on the head in passing and even his tutors did little more now than tell him which book he should read that day. He had long since surpassed any knowledge that they could teach him.

Worst of all, he hadn’t seen his mother at all for months.

“Well?” the strange pup demanded impatiently. “Can I come in? Time’s a wastin’. Things to do, places to go, people to see, ya know?”

Castiel blinked slowly, struggling a little, both with the boy’s accent and his statement itself. He most certainly didn’t know. Though he decided it was probably best not to say so. “There aren’t any bodies here, just barnacles,” he said, a little apologetically.

The boy’s expression fell for a moment, but then he shrugged lightly. “Then maybe there’s treasure or ghosts, or…”

“Just barnacles,” Castiel repeated, a little too sharply, perhaps unsettled by the mention of ghosts.

“Oh,” the boy said, his expression falling dejectedly. His stunning green eyes flicked sideways, as though he was already preparing an escape route from the awkward conversation. He did, after all, apparently have things to do and places to go and people to see. The boy, unlike Castiel, wasn’t lonely. Wasn’t stupidly just trying to fill his time with the measuring of barnacles.

Castiel struggled to find something interesting to say now that he’d dashed the other boy’s hopes. Something, anything, to stop him from just swimming away again. “Don’t go,” he wanted to say. “Please don’t go. Don’t leave me alone. I’m so sick of always being alone.” But his mouth was dry with nerves and he couldn’t make the words emerge. Fortunately, despite Castiel’s apparent rejection of his initial overtures, the stranger seemed as reluctant to simply give up yet as Castiel was to see him leave.

“My dad said there are loads more wrecks like this closer to the shore. Maybe some of those have treasure or maps or dead Land Monsters or ghosts,” the boy suggested cautiously.

“Maybe,” Castiel managed to agree, and attempted an approximation of a smile. He doubted it was a good approximation. Smiling wasn’t something his mouth was familiar with attempting. However, his efforts, poor as they were, proved worthwhile regardless.

The boy grinned widely again, as though all he had needed was the slightest hint of encouragement to return to his naturally sunny, confident nature. He rose upwards from behind the barnacle-encrusted hull of the sunken ship and Castiel gaped with wonder as the strangeness of the boy’s eyes faded into insignificance next to the fact both his tail and fluke were the color of fire.

Castiel blinked in astonishment.

The only time he’d ever seen such flame-like color was the fiery mane of the sea-witch herself and even she, for all the peculiar hue of her hair, had a perfectly ordinary, turquoise tail. The Mer of Atlan all had blue-hued tails. Those blues ranged from sky blue to turquoise, from blueish-grey through violet to near indigo. Tails came in a myriad of hues.

But, regardless of hue, blue was the only possible color of tail ever witnessed in Atlan.

“You’re a Wildling,’ he gasped, totally thrilled. The anomalous presence of someone so exotic was far more interesting than studying the life cycle of barnacles and broke entirely through his previous shy reticence. Faced with such a puzzle, such a wonder, his curiosity was too insatiable for silence.

“Um, rude much?” the boy said with a scowl, his cheeks flushing with angry embarrassment, and Castiel flushed, too, as he realized his excited exclamation had probably been taken as an insult.

“I meant no disrespect by my observation,” he said hastily, all remaining vestiges of his own normal shyness crumbling under the weight of his personal horror at possibly being perceived as a bigot. “I have read much of your people in Rowena’s tomes and know you are alleged to be wild, fierce warriors and hunters of enviable repute. In fact,” he added, in a near whisper, “My own father is said to have recently employed the most magnificent Wildling warrior of all to hunt for the Royal Palace and that is why our feasts are so bounteous of late.” Then he paused and dipped his head bashfully. “Though I don’t know whether that is actually true,” he admitted. “My acquaintance with the inhabitants of Atlan is restricted to the Inner Court. And none of them really talk to me directly, so I only know what I accidentally overhear.”

“You’re a Prince?” the boy asked, startled, his remaining confidence visibly deflating even further with that knowledge.

“Only a very minor one,” Castiel assured him quickly. “I am of no import at all.” He wasn’t even being falsely modest. With six much older siblings, he was pretty certain his own role was definitely surplus to requirements. Nobody needed an heir and six spares.

“My dad says all the Atlan royals are so ‘up their own asses they can’t see daylight for lookin’.’ And yet here you are, all alone, far from the Inner Court an’ talkin’ to me like you’re normal folk,” the strange boy retorted, his eyes sparkling with renewed humor and his face relaxing back into a confident grin. “Howdj’ya get out without the guards stoppin’ ya?”

“There are tunnels under the City, paths carved eons ago by the volcanoes that formed this region. I found them marked on a map in the cave of the Sea-witch. No one else seems to remember they exist,” Castiel explained carefully.

“Woah. Cool,” the Wildling exclaimed, looking totally impressed. “You’re really smart, huh? I can barely read and write my own name yet,” he admitted. “Books and stuff weren’t really a thing where I came from, so I’m kinda strugglin’ with all this boring school stuff everyone thinks is so damn important here in Atlan.” But then he shrugged as though he didn’t really care one way or the other and grinned so infectiously that Castiel blinked with surprise. His cheeks felt weirdly hot from the praise. He’d been called ‘smart’ before, but previously the word had sounded like a flaw to him rather than something to be proud of. Gabriel and Michael, for all they treated him kindly overall on the rare occasions they spoke with him, always sounded gently mocking when they remarked on his intelligence.

“I like school ‘stuff’,” he admitted quietly, almost like he was admitting a catalog of sins. “I like learning things. I love books. Reading and writing. All that ‘boring’ stuff.” He prayed his honesty wouldn’t drive the strange pup away. That the pup wouldn’t find him too boring.

“That’s okay,” the Wildling shrugged casually. “My mom does, too. Guess it’d be even more boring if we all liked the same stuff anyway, huh?”

“I suppose so,” Castiel agreed slowly. It was a new and strange concept. The idea that anyone, such as the Wildling pup, might consider learning to be ‘boring’ was so anomalous to his own experience that he was struggling to understand it at all. Yet the fact, like the pup’s exotic looks and his peculiar accent, somehow only added to his mystique.

“Still, that don’t explain what you’re doing out here. I thought all of you Royal types were kept imprisoned in the palace to keep you away from common folk like me,” the boy snickered.

Castiel opened his mouth to object, then paused and gave some careful consideration to his reply. “I believe the guards are intended to protect me, rather than imprison me,” he said. “Though I can see the reason for your confusion as to any difference between the two scenarios. Hence why I choose simply to leave through the tunnels unseen.”

The boy barked a delighted laugh. “Do those innocent blue eyes mask the heart of a rebel?” he asked, and although the words were gently mocking, his expression appeared genuinely impressed. Unlike the teasing of his brothers, somehow the boy made Castiel feel he was part of the joke rather than the butt of it.

Sadly, though, Castiel feared he would soon dash the boy’s surprisingly positive perception of him. He flushed again, though this time with a different type of shame. He wasn’t proud of his habit of sneaking out of the palace unseen, so didn’t deserve any praise for his act of rebellion. “I just like it here,” he admitted softly, “It’s quiet. Peaceful. The palace is so… loud.”

It was true. The endless Sonics of so many Mer dwelling together created a low, constant murmur that was supposed to feel like a protective net around him yet, honestly, more often felt like a smothering blanket.

The Wildling considered the comment thoughtfully before saying, “My dad says Merpeople weren’t designed to live like this, crowded into cities like caged fish. We’re supposed to flow with the eddies, let the waters lead us as they will. He says livin’ in one place is ‘damned unnatural’. Plus, it makes huntin’ much harder. The more flavorsome prey has learned to automatically avoid Atlan ‘cos of years of over-fishin’, so he has to lead your hunters far from this realm to keep the City larders filled with decent variety. Sometimes he’s gone for days. I miss him when he’s gone,” he added, his sunny smile dipping into sadness.

The boy’s words made sudden sense of his presence. “Your father is the Wildling Hunter, John?”

“Well, my mom calls him ‘Johannes’, but yeah, I guess that’s what you folks call him. So none of us are ‘Wildlings,’ anyway. We’re citizens of Atlan now, just like you,’ he announced, though he didn’t look particularly pleased at the prospect. “Everybody hates me here,” he added, and his expression was as bewildered as it was sorrowful, as though it had never even occurred to him, before his arrival at Atlan, that anyone might resist his beautiful eyes and his infectious grin and charming nature.

And Castiel, who in his eight whole years of life had never truly pondered before that the feelings of another person could ever be more important to him than his own, found himself wounded by the look of confused sorrow on the other boy’s face. It was, somehow, unbearable that a creature as warm and sunny and beautiful as the Wildling Merpup should ever be unhappy.

“I don’t hate you,” Castiel told him, with simple honesty. “I think you’re the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Even prettier than a Giant Green Anemone.”

The Wildling looked startled, but pleased, and he grinned so widely that his nose wrinkled with pleasure. “Then we’ll be friends,’ he stated firmly. “I gotta go now, but I’ll see you here tomorrow, yeah? Maybe we could go check out those other wrecks. Maybe they have bodies or ghosts for us to find.”

Castiel knew he should say ‘no’. It was one thing to cross the 10 tail-lengths between the tunnel and this hulk, a totally different prospect to swim off into the deep ocean towards the shoreline in search of other shipwrecks. The first, if discovered, would cause him a severe scolding. The latter would probably result in him being grounded for eternity.

And yet, looking at the Wildling’s huge, friendly, green eyes and his wide, white, infectious smile, the only word that Castiel could utter was, “Okay.”

“Cool,” the boy said, and winked at him cheekily before flicking his tail and shooting away from the wreckage so quickly that Castiel was left simply staring in bewilderment at the churning water left in his wake.

Castiel had never had a ‘friend’. As the youngest Prince of Atlan, an unexpected addition to the Royal family two decades later than his precedents, even his siblings were adults who spared little time for him. He was the only pup dwelling in the Inner Court and though all the adults, from Royalty down to servants, treated him with kind indulgence, none of them spared time to even talk to him, let alone play. So Castiel, a naturally quiet but inquisitive child, had found his solace in books and learning, able even at eight years old to read almost every word written in Rowena’s books. And since the busy adults around him had found it both ‘cute’ and convenient that he contented himself with studious pursuits, it had clearly never occurred to any of them he might be lonely.

That the idea of having a friend might be something even more exotic and desirous than the Wildling was himself.

Castiel had a friend.

And the idea was like a warm nugget that nestled against his heart as he swam to the narrow crevice that marked the entrance to the tunnel that led back to the Inner Court.

**XXXX**

Because he shouldn’t have been outside of the Inner Court at all, so couldn’t ask directly about the strange Wildling boy without revealing his own disobedience, Castiel had to wait for the palace gossip to drift into his hearing of its own accord. Fortunately, since people were so used to his quiet presence that they tended to ignore it entirely, and the fact that gossip was not only the one thing guaranteed to travel faster than sonics through water, but that gossip about newcomers was juicy enough to be chewed over endlessly, it was less than a day before he knew the whole story.

Well, the whole rumored story which, even at eight years old, Castiel understood was probably only a loose approximation of the truth.

Still, what he did hear was thus:

Several years before his own birthing, the lady Maré, daughter of Lord Sameel, had left Atlan in search of her Destiny.

Destiny was not a word used lightly by the people of Atlan. Destiny was the following of prophecy, the adherence to the idea that some of those of Royal blood had predetermined truemates.

Castiel was still uncertain what specifically differentiated those with destinies from those without. Nobody seemed able or willing to explain that to him. He gathered it was something about singing, something about ‘having a song to sing’, but since all the Mer he knew sang songs all of the time, he failed to grasp the significant difference between those songs and a ‘truemate’ song. Though his difficulty possibly stemmed from the fact that neither had anyone successfully described the term truemates to him, either.

His brother Gabriel, impatiently struggling to appropriately explain what a truemate was to such a young Merpup, had finally declared, “It’s like finding your bestest, truest friend and knowing instantly you will be friends forever.”

Apparently Lady Maré had a Destiny so, on her twenty-first birthday, she had left Atlan alone in search of her truemate. Ten years later, she had returned to their kingdom with a terrifying Wildling warrior at her side, a young Merpup at her feet and a tiny swaddled pup in her arms.

Her return had been, Castiel gathered, somewhat of a scandal. Not only because it was unheard of for someone with a Destiny to ever return to their original home but, primarily, because her Destiny had resided in a Wildling ‘savage’.

Still, his own father the King, not one to reject an opportunity regardless of court opinion, had declared that since ‘Johannes’ was Maré’s Destiny, his presence was not an affront to Pontus as some people were suggesting but was, in fact, a gift from him. So he had immediately appointed the Wildling Warrior to be his Chief Hunter, regardless of the voices of protest from his own advisors. Since, within days, the palace larders had begun to fill with delicacies long forgotten by the people of Atlan as a result of that decision, the voices of dissent soon changed to avaricious delight at the king’s cleverness.

The Lady Maré had been cautiously offered a welcome back into the palace, although Castiel gained the distinct impression that ‘welcomed’ was less of an accurate description than ‘tolerated’ and speculation was rife as to what chaos might be wrought by her half-blood offspring who, since they shared their father’s coloration, would ‘inevitably’ share his wild nature. It was general opinion that the younglings would prove to be total hellions whose disruptive presence would soon outweigh whatever benefit their father brought to their table.

None of the Wildling family, save the Lady Maré herself, had been granted access to the inner-court itself. The Lady Maré had, as a consequence, refused to enter the palace at all, let alone the inner-court, and so the entire family were apparently now living in one of the caves beneath the sea-mountain to the left of the city itself. Which was, Castiel noted, a long swim from the wreck where he and the Wildling pup had met.

The few times people did notice Castiel’s presence as they discussed the latest scandal, they took the opportunity to stress to him, most arduously, that the Wildling pup, Dean, was a dangerous, illiterate and chaotic creature that he should be careful to avoid in the unlikely event the little savage was ever offered entrance into the hallowed inner court.

But all Castiel heard was ‘Dean’.

The beautiful, exotic Merpup now had a name, and that name was Dean, and Castiel knew, somehow, with a rightness that thrummed through his body with a resonance that drowned even the unbearable Sonics of the crowded palace, that Dean, his first, and so far only, friend would surely prove to be his Destiny. His true mate.

Because he knew what a true mate was now.

The one destined to be his bestest, truest friend forever.

**XXXX**

Castiel soon discovered the court gossips had been right about the Wildling half-blood, Dean.

Dean was a hellion. And to call him merely chaotic was like calling a tsunami a ‘big wave’.

Because after that first meeting, whenever Castiel snuck away from his snoozing tutors and slipped through the lava tunnels to the sea outside, Dean would inevitably be waiting for him, impish grin on his handsome face, and rather than spend his stolen time in peaceful, lonely reflection or in the pursuit of developing his ‘scientific mind’, Castiel soon found himself lured further and further away from the palace on one reckless adventure after another.

Why read about Sea Anemones, of whatever color, when Dean could unerringly lead him to a place where they grew in abundance? Why spend hours reading Rowena’s tales of those terrors of the sea, the sharks, when Dean could take him, shaking with both fear and excitement, to a deep trench from where he could spy on the creatures for himself?

Though their adventures were not always without incident.

Castiel bore a scar on his left wrist from where a jellyfish had stung him so badly that his blood had filled with poison and his gills had ceased to filter oxygen and he had nearly drowned. But Dean, as always, had known exactly what to do. He had sucked the poison out with his own mouth (which was, honestly, the real reason for the scar as it had been Dean’s sharp incisors that had done more damage to his flesh than the sting itself) and he had forced the air back into Castiel’s lungs with sharp hugs of his strong arms. and then he had packed the wound with algae and wrapped it with bladder wrack. Then with deft, sure fingers, Dean had woven a bracelet of green rope seaweed, and threaded it with pretty seashells, before fastening it around Castiel’s wrist to camouflage the injury.

For all that Dean constantly put himself down, admitting how much he was still struggling with every aspect of the formal Atlan schooling, his knowledge of real things put all of Castiel’s tutors to shame. Dean was too quick to dismiss his scholastic difficulties as proof of some lack in himself. For Castiel, who could conceive of no way in which his one and only friend could be in lack of anything, the fault lay purely in Dean’s reluctant tutors who showed little interest in encouraging a ‘savage’ at all.

“I hate it. Hate the sitting still. Hate the boredom of it. Anyway, the tutors loathe me. They think I’m inherently stupid, just because my people choose to memorize our history rather than scratch it down onto shells,” Dean said, one day, when they were floating together in the warmer shallow waters close to the shores of the Land Monsters, and laughing at the antics of some frolicking seals. Although the Wildling had not lost his accent, his lexicon had grown exponentially to include so many Atlan words that he spoke now with a confident fluidity that even Castiel envied sometimes.

It was a Mer peculiarity that they rarely bothered to learn other languages. Mer of different Cities spoke to each other, and to creatures of other species, in their own tongue and then their ears simply translated the foreign words they heard in reply into their own chosen language. Mer found it so easy and natural to communicate in such a fashion that Mer rarely worried about the occasional misunderstanding caused by a mistranslation or even an untranslatable concept. Dean, however, had easily and naturally identified all of the Atlan words that conflicted with his own or had no equivalent in his native tongue and so he now spoke a fluid combination of both tongues.

That fact alone convinced Castiel of Dean’s keen native intelligence. Dean was capable of learning and remembering all that he was taught. The fact he struggled still with reading and writing was not a lack of intellect then, in Castiel’s opinion, but simply Dean’s stubborn refusal to see such tasks as important enough to apply genuine effort to. Like a shark, Dean couldn’t bear to stay still. Dean was too naturally active and so was simply bored stupid by the idea of anything that forced him to stop moving. Dean didn’t want to read about other people doing stuff. He wanted to do it himself.

And, although that attitude was so removed from his own, Castiel truly believed it was a valid one for someone like Dean.

“Perhaps,” Castiel told him “some Mer become tutors because their only hope of grandeur is to bask in the reflected glory of the heroes whose stories they read when they were younglings. Perhaps real heroes don’t have to learn to read and write at all, because they are too busy doing important stuff to stop doing it long enough to read or write about it. Maybe that’s why your people sing histories instead of reading them. Because they are too busy to stop still long enough to write stuff down.”

And Dean had laughed delightedly and said, “I don’t really understand what you just said, but it sounded good so I’ll assume it was a compliment.”

“It was,” Castiel assured him, his eyes regarding Dean with nothing except sincere adoration.

**xxxx**

Castiel was eleven when his mother, the beautiful Queen Naomi, died.

Not through violence nor an accident, but from a wasting sickness that had gradually stolen her life force over several years until eventually she was too weak and frail to even leave her bedchamber.

The last few weeks of her life were the first time in three years that Castiel did not sneak out of the palace every day to meet with Dean. Instead, he spent every spare minute at Naomi’s side. He was still too young to fully comprehend what death meant, but he knew his time with his mother was limited and understood the need to create whatever memories of her he could before she was stolen away.

And Queen Naomi, pale and tired, who sent everyone else from her side with waspish demands they ceased hovering over her like carrion fish on a corpse, allowed only Castiel, her youngest child, to keep vigil at her side.

“You understand that I must leave you soon forever?” she asked. “Not through my choice but through the impossibility of battling any longer against my fate? My song has been sung, Castiel, and nothing remains except the fading echoes of my past deeds. It is finally time for me to move on.”

“Destiny calls you to a place where none may choose to follow,” he said, because Rowena had explained that much to him. Then he frowned and added, “Though I don’t really understand since I thought your Destiny was my father.”

“Oh, little fish,” she sighed. “If only you were older. I had hoped to have more time before this conversation. Still, with each passing year it becomes harder, not easier, for I find it increasingly impossible to believe the truth of what I must tell you. You are such a solemn, sober, serious little pup. So naturally inclined to scholarly pursuits. So unlike myself and so much more like your father, who, though I love him dearly, lives his life through books rather than deeds and might as well be absent from this City altogether for how seldom he emerges from his library. You are such a delicate creature, Castiel, with the wisdom of a dolphin rather than the fierce heart of a shark. I can hardly bear to imagine you ever leaving the safe haven of the Inner Court, let alone ever facing the danger that lurks within the vast waters of the Ocean that surrounds us.”

“Gabriel once took me near the shores of the Land Monsters,” Castiel felt obliged to point out.

“No doubt with an escort of fierce guards to protect you,” she countered.

And he nodded his assent.

“That’s not really the same thing,” she sighed. “So many times I have questioned the judgment of the Sea Witch in this matter. And not only I. The whole court has oftimes doubted her words. They all hold you precious to their hearts, little serious fish, and none can bear even to look at you sometimes for knowing the fate she decreed when she prophesied your future.”

A cold spear of dread pierced Castiel’s heart, but his thirst for knowledge, as always, overcame his fear of learning whatever dire future his mother was alluding to. Still, the pain in her eyes and her obvious fear of distressing him with her words was too much for him to bear and so he took her hands in his and squeezed her webbed fingers gently as he bravely spoke the words he hoped would ease her fears.

“Am I slowly dying, too?” he asked, his voice calm. “I have sometimes wondered whether that might be the case, for I wander the halls of the palace unseen and unnoticed so often that I might as well be a ghost. Don’t misunderstand me. All are kind and caring and respectful of me. I claim no slight. Yet none seek my company of choice. The Sea Witch is always welcoming of my presence but I have experienced no friendship within these walls and, were I not to know better, I might feel unworthy of friendship altogether. But since I do know better, I wonder, sometimes, whether the truth is that all within the Inner Court know some terrible secret about me that makes them be kind yet distant. A secret my friend does not know. I do not complain, mother. I merely find it to be confusing. So you may speak plainly to me of my fate.”

Naomi smiled, her eyes sparkling with surprise. “Perhaps I was too hasty in my judgment of you, little fish. Am I to take, from your comment, that you have made a friend not of the Court? And, if so, how is this possible?”

Castiel hesitated a moment, bursting with the need to regale his mother with the wonder that was his friend Dean, yet fearful that, in doing so, he might be forbidden from leaving the palace again.

“Tell me, please,” she said. “Ease my pain a while with your tales of this special friend, my darling pup. I promise your secrets are safe with me.”

And, so, he told her everything of his last three years. Of his secret life outside of the palace.

About Dean, the Wildling half-blood who was his bestest, truest friend forever, and of his own way out of the palace via the secret tunnels, and of their forbidden adventures together. He showed her his bracelet and even pulled it back to show the tiny scar. Though, even for his mother, he refused to remove it from his wrist completely. He told of how he had danced in the slipstream of sharks, and debated with dolphins and wrestled with seals. How he had snuck out one night and risen to the very surface of the sea so that he and Dean could float together on their backs and count the stars in the distant sky. How Dean had once taken him right to a cove at the edge of the world of the Land Monsters and they had feasted together by raiding the lobster pots there.

And Naomi stared at him, her violet eyes kind, and said, “All in the palace speak only of you as the ‘good pup’, the ‘quiet prince’, the studious, solemn boy who should have been destined to be a great Atlan scholar like his father, were it not for the prophecy. And yet, you are not that boy at all, are you?”

“Are you disappointed in me, mother?” Castiel asked, heartbroken.

Instead of answering him, she bid him fetch her treasure box, a heavy, ornate object formed of a giant conch shell, and rummaging inside it she withdrew a fine, corded necklace upon which a single precious gem was suspended.

“Do you know what this is?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“This is a Destiny stone, Castiel. I was gifted it as a child and told it would lead me to my inevitable Destiny. That, when I reached maturity, it would flare to life, burning like a star, telling me I must leave my home and swim into the ocean alone and, if I followed its call and followed it true, it would write the song of my life and show me the way I must follow to find my true mate. And do you know what I did?”

“You followed the stone and thus found father,” Castiel said with innocent confidence. “Because he was your Destiny.”

“I did,” she agreed. “I left my home and my family, left all that I loved and held dear, and ventured out into the unknown, afraid and alone. It was so frightening, Castiel. And not a little dangerous. But I was brave and I followed the path shown to me and I left the still waters of the farthest North and battled through the domains of the great whales and the walruses and the sea lions, until I eventually came here and found your father. And then I put the necklace away, knowing my song was sung and the time would come when I would pass it to the chosen one of the next generation.

“And as each of your brothers and sisters were born, I asked Rowena to tell me if they were the one pup of this generation who should inherit the Destiny stone, as, indeed, did each of the other parents of pups born within the Royal Court for it is not always a prince or princess who fate chooses, of course. Yet each and every time she consulted with the stars and the tides and said, ‘not this one, your majesty. The Destiny-touched pup is yet to be born.’ Until you came along, little fish. So late and unexpected. My wonderful surprise pup. I handed you to her for your naming ceremony and she said, ‘This is the one, Your Majesty. This is the pup with a Destiny.”

“Me?” Castiel yelped in shock.

“Believe me, I was as surprised as you,” his mother confessed. “And as the years passed I became more and more convinced that the Sea-Witch was mistaken. You became more and more like your father with every passing year, withdrawing into your books and your studies like a hermit crab burrowing inside its shell. How could my shy, studious, quiet son possibly be the one with a song to sing? As much as I loved you, I couldn’t imagine you even choosing to leave the Inner Court, let alone leave Atlan altogether. Never did I picture you ‘dancing in the slipstream of sharks’.

“But the prophecy is, I suspect, why those of the Court have held you at arms-length, Castiel, because they always knew your time with us would be brief. That your Destiny would call and you would leave us forever, never to return. And I sorrow for that. I regret I was too unwell to notice what was happening within these walls. I thought you were a solitary soul by choice. I did not realize your isolation was not of your own desiring. But you were just the pup of an absent father and a sickly mother, I suppose. The blame for any unhappiness you have suffered lies at my door, and I beg forgiveness for my neglect.”

Castiel sniffed a little, his heart breaking at his mother’s sorrow. “Please don’t be sad, mother. Had people treated me differently, I might never have found the bravery to traverse the lava tunnels and, if so, I might have never met Dean. He is not welcome at all within these walls, even though his mother is the Lady Maré, which isn’t even fair,” he added, pouting a little at the terrible injustice.

“That is another slight I have failed to address,” Naomi stated, nodding her agreement with his protest. “It most certainly is not ‘fair’. By warrant of Maré’s bloodline, your friend Dean, and indeed his whole family, are members of the Royal Clan. It has been remiss of me not to put my foot down on this matter. Maré has never caused a fuss about it, that’s not her way, so whilst I cannot claim total ignorance of the prejudice she has suffered, I suppose I let it slip my attention since none reminded me of my obligation to interfere. No more, however. This nonsense stops right now. I promise you, little pup, that henceforth your friend will be welcome to visit you within these walls. In fact, should Maré graciously accept my apologies for my prior neglect of her rights, perhaps she will even agree to move her family to dwell here and you can spend all your time with your friend without sneaking out of the palace to meet him.

“Furthermore, I wish now to gift my Destiny stone to you, Castiel, in the knowledge that you are brave and true. Of all my children, I now believe you are the one who will have the courage to follow the path when it finally shines to reveal your way. Will you accept this gift from me and promise, on your life, that you will follow the path that it shows you, no matter where it leads?”

“Of course,” he agreed. “I swear on my life. But, well, I should tell you that it is probably going to be wasted on me. I don’t need it, Mother. My true mate already lives here in Atlan. So I don’t need to follow any path to find him. I already know Dean will be my Destiny,” Castiel stated innocently. “He’s my bestest, truest friend. So he’s my true mate, isn’t he?”

Queen Naomi laughed, the sound as pretty as bells, and for a moment the weight of her mortality lifted off her completely and she looked as young and beautiful as the day she had arrived in Atlan to claim her mate.

“Oh, Castiel. You’re so solemn and serious I sometimes forget just how very young you still are. I’m sure Dean will always be your ‘bestest, truest friend’. But when you’re a little older, you’ll understand that a true mate is so much more than that. Somewhere out there is your real true mate. The one destined to be the other half of your soul.”

**XXXX**

Despite Castiel’s immediate assurances that he had no intention of leaving Atlan (or Dean) ever, Dean’s reaction to his news of the necklace was not a positive one.

Instead of being thrilled and intrigued and excited by the existence of the magical gem, as Castiel was, he immediately declared it “stupid”.

In many ways, Castiel agreed, since it was pretty ‘stupid’ to be given a Destiny stone intended to lead him on a journey to find someone who wasn’t even lost; the necklace itself, as a gift from his mother, was infinitely precious to him. So Dean calling it stupid and telling him he should ‘throw it away,’ despite his solemn vow to his mother to follow its call, caused an unfamiliar wave of hurt anger to explode out of him.

Which was why Castiel blurted that Dean was stupid.

He didn’t mean it. Well, not in the way Dean took it. He saw the terrible, wounded look in those beloved green eyes before he even realized the awful word had unthinkingly left his mouth and he immediately realized it was probably the most unforgivable thing to ever say to someone who was so insecure about their scholastic ability. Who was so ridiculed by others over his inability to learn how to read and write.

It was their first and only major argument.

Dean swam away in offended fury and stayed away for so long the moon tide came twice before his return.

Castiel missed him so much it was like a knife in his chest every single waking moment. Yet he never went after him, never approached him to apologize, never thought that he should be the one to mend their fractured friendship.

Not because he didn’t care. Not because he didn’t want to. Not even because he didn’t believe himself to be the one at fault. Simply because he didn’t feel as though he had the right to approach Dean at all, after being so terribly, unthinkingly cruel to him. He had never felt worthy of Dean’s friendship, anyway, so when it was taken away he honestly, truthfully, felt that Pontus had realized Dean was a gift that Castiel had never deserved and so had, quite rightfully, taken him away again as punishment for Castiel’s ingratitude.

And so, when Dean finally returned, sheepish and cautious and apologetic, and offered his friendship once more, Castiel snatched at it eagerly, hungrily, greedily, assuring Dean there was nothing to ‘forgive’, nothing to apologize for.

But it was years later before it occurred to him that he had failed the first true test of their friendship. He had, yet again, made Dean make all of the effort and take all of the risks. That in indulging his own feelings of inadequacy, he had done nothing except reinforce Dean’s own self-doubt.

It was also years before either dared mention the subject of the necklace again out loud. Though often, Castiel would glance from the corner of his eyes and see Dean staring at the gem around his neck with a look of heart-rending sadness and unfathomable loss. Whenever he did, he always made extra effort to assure Dean how brave and clever he was as a hunter because he imagined the look on Dean’s face was a memory of the time Castiel had been so unthinkingly cruel to him regarding his illiteracy.

**XXXX**

“I don’t understand,” he grumbled to Rowena, a few weeks after Dean had mended their friendship. The week when Queen Naomi finally made her final journey back to the arms of Pontus and the condolences of all the Inner Court had been inextricably linked to the expectation that in fulfilling his own Destiny he would give her life meaning. It felt less like comfort and more like an unbearable burden laid upon his shoulders. “What’s the point of the Destiny stones, anyway?”

“Why, dearie, they’re magic. You don’t question magic. Well, not when it’s beneficial magic, anyway. The Destiny stones were gifted to our people by the Pontus himself. I fear it seems that Pontus has long since left us to our own devices, but the stones remain, passed down from one generation to the next.”

Castiel shook his head. “I don’t believe in magic. That’s just a word for science we don’t yet understand.”

“I’m a witch,” she retorted dryly. “Not the best person to discuss the existence of magic with.’

“You call yourself a witch because you like how it makes people fear you,” Castiel replied, with all the wisdom of his eleven years. “But you’re a scientist and a scholar, so you know there’s no such thing as ‘magic’. I know it and you know it. Isn’t it time we speak honestly with each other?”

“Perhaps it is,” she said. “Whilst I agree most magic can be explained by the science we remember, and the rest can probably be explained by the science we have long forgotten, that doesn’t negate the truth that the magic exists. The problem is not ‘Magic’. It is simply our perception of what ‘Magic’ means that is at fault. You want to know the truth? What I really think? You want me to finally admit my heretical truth? The heresy that puts me at odds even with the King of the Witches himself? I believe that there were no gods. That the Hu were never mansfish. That they are essentially no better nor worse than Mer. That we all evolved as we did through biology alone. That thousands of years ago, when our people still dwelled in shallow waters and lived in harmony with the land creatures, we built an empire so strong that we had time to develop such matters as art and science until we virtually became gods ourselves.

“And although we were displaced by climatic disasters and the greed and warmongering of the Hu, so we chose to sever our relations with them and retreated to live in deeper waters, the works we created in those days still exist. Only, now, we call those workings magic. I think the Destiny Stones were created on purpose to ensure genetic diversification. It’s not good for the gene pool of individual populations to remain stagnant. Cross-breeding strengthens the royal bloodlines. It also encourages peace and tolerance. A kingdom is less likely to declare war on its neighbors if the King of one city is mated to a prince or princess of another. “

“The Lady Maré wasn’t a Princess, though,” Castiel pointed out grumpily.

Rowena shrugged. “That’s part of creating stronger bloodlines, too. It’s just as important that the lower Royals don’t just mate amongst themselves, isn’t it? If a truemate is strong and brave like Johannes of the Wildlings, then his genes are far more important than his status.”

“Which is exactly my point,” Castiel griped. “Since my mate will be male, I will have no offspring. So  
Genetic diversity is irrelevant. I’m an evolutionary dead end, aren’t I?”

“Perhaps not,” she suggested. “Just because the only person you think you love is male doesn’t necessarily mean your true mate will be male. Most Merpeople are flexible about that kind of thing.”

“I’m not,” Castiel stated firmly.

“So?” Rowena shrugged. “It’s an imperfect science, perhaps. It makes little difference why the stones were created. It doesn’t detract from the fact the stone will know ‘magically’ who your true mate is and will lead you to them.”

“It won’t have to lead me very far,” Castiel muttered rebelliously, under his breath.

**xxxx**

Castiel was twelve when he fell in love.

Though perhaps that is a sophistry, because he was twelve when he first realized he was in love but, in honesty, his fall had most probably started four years earlier on the day he first set eyes on Dean of the Wildlings.

And had he been asked, at any point during those four years, whether he loved Dean he would have declared, with great and honest passion, that of course he loved Dean. Dean was, after all, his bestest, truest friend, forever.

But Castiel was twelve when puberty first came calling and he first realized there was a difference between love and being in love.

Being in love was messy and awkward and embarrassing.

It made things, once so easy, suddenly become horribly difficult.

Particularly because he became aware for the first time that the two years of difference in their ages, which had seemed totally irrelevant previously, now became like a huge chasm between them.

For all of Dean’s maturity of attitude and physical build, Dean was most definitely still a ‘pup’. Castiel, however, felt the first stirrings of the man he would become.

Seemingly overnight, he no longer felt comfortable to simply be who he was in front of Dean. He lost his carefree certainty of their friendship and became, in Dean’s words, a little “weird”.

“Sheesh, Cas,” Dean said, one day, when they were perusing old maps in Rowena’s cave in search of a new, faster route to the reefs of Penizore, in the hope they could find a way to travel there and back within a day (since Michael had point-blank refused their request to stay out all night alone and they had both agreed it wouldn’t be much of an adventure if they went there with an escort of palace guards) and Castiel had checked with him a dozen times whether he was “bored” or “hungry” or “thirsty” and had assured him another dozen times that if Dean wanted to do something else he wouldn’t mind. “You tryin’ to get rid of me or something?”

“No, never, not at all, definitely not,” Castiel blurted, in a panic, squirming awkwardly as his cheeks flushed as though he had a fever.

Dean looked at him strangely. “You feeling okay?”

“Fine. Definitely fine. Absolutely fine.”

“Weird,” Dean announced, but thankfully just shrugged and returned to tracing a line over the map with his index finger.

And Castiel decided being in love sucked.

When he said as much to Rowena, much later, she reached out and tapped the dormant gem around his neck significantly. “You have a Destiny, Castiel. Never forget that. Hearts are delicate things and there are many different degrees and forms of love. For instance, sometimes real love is knowing the difference between when you should cling tight and when you should let someone go.”

Her comment was so peculiar that Castiel didn’t even waste his breath trying to get to the bottom of it. How could love ever be shown by letting someone go?

He decided Rowena, for all her knowledge of science and magic, was probably not a reliable authority on matters of the heart.

**XXXX**

Castiel was thirteen when he finally understood the real definition of a true mate, when a darkly exotic Merwoman, her skin the pale brown of a whale shark and her tail and fluke the deep bronze of rusted metal, arrived in Atlan.

Drawn to their city by the glowing light of her Destiny stone, the Princess Kali of Khalessi arrived bedraggled and weary, her fluke bearing the scar of a vicious shark bite and her back bearing a tattoo of peculiar round marks that she said were the result of a battle with a many-tentacled sea monster that she named a Kraken (though, privately, Rowena scoffed and claimed the creature must merely have been a Giant Squid). She had, apparently, taken almost a year to journey to Atlan from her home far to the East.

Despite the scars from her journey, Kali was still exceedingly beautiful.

So much so that several of the unmated royals turned their eyes towards her with hopeful adoration, but she had come to find her Destiny so, argue as they might between themselves, all knew her choice was already made by fate long before her arrival in Atlan.

It was, then, perhaps just a mark of her contentious nature that she held the court in suspense for a short while before she finally named the Merman who was the other half of her soul, by publicly announcing her intended mate was Gabriel.

Michael had taken on the mantle of King when their father had chosen to officially abdicate, some months after their mother’s death (though, honestly, he hadn’t ever really been interested in acting like a King, so all his decision did was make his habitual absenteeism more formal in nature). So Michael was the one who stepped forward to remove the Destiny stone from Kali’s neck and solemnly declare to the Inner Court that its work was done. And done well.

Gabriel was certainly ecstatic, his already exuberant personality escalating into near mania, and he swam around the palace like a dervish until he was satisfied that everyone had learned of his good fortune.

There was much celebration of the union and the Princess Kali, now of Atlan, was feted by the people. Her tales of adventure and danger-filled many an evening in the Inner Court. She was even more exotic and alien to them than a Wildling. Her people, the Khalessi, who lived in an ocean far to the East, were reputed to be even more hot-tempered and warlike than the equatorial Wildings, yet her presence brought little of the same scandal that had greeted Lady Maré’s return to the City.

Surprisingly, it appeared that the formerly bigoted population of Atlan were now completely open to the idea that ‘different’ didn’t necessarily equate to ‘bad’.

Which was when, in contemplation of this unexpected realization, Castiel, usually oblivious to the moods and attitudes around him, finally became aware of a surprising fact.

It appeared his friend Dean was no longer unpopular.

In fact, it appeared no one had a single bad word to say about him anymore. At some point during the last two years since Naomi had ruled that Johannes of the Wildlings was, in fact, to henceforth be known as Lord John, and that his family were to be moved to reside within the Inner Court, Dean’s relentless charm offensive had finally collapsed the last battlements of public opinion and, although he was still considered an unrepentant hellion by many, the term was now spoken with indulgent fondness.

A fact that confused Castiel greatly.

Not the fact that people had finally released their prejudices and finally had seen Dean for the wonderful person Castiel had always known him to be, since that was a given. But that, despite his new popularity, Dean still spent so much time with him.

When he questioned Dean about it, the beautiful half-blood boy just smiled at him fondly. “You’re my best friend, Cas. Of course I spend my free time with you. There’s no-one else I’d rather be with.”

And though the statement should have thrilled him, it instead caused his heart to stutter a little because ‘best friends’ didn’t feel like enough.

“Because we’re bestest, truest, friends forever,” Castiel stated, a little sadly.

“Bestest, truest, friends forever,” Dean agreed, and if he saw the disappointment in Castiel’s eyes at the pronouncement he didn’t mention it.

But then again, Castiel told himself, for all of his strapping muscles and the fact his tail was as long as his own, Dean was still only eleven. Still only a pup.

Probably too young to even understand the difference yet between ‘love’ and ‘in-love’.

They still had plenty of time.

**xxxx**

“I envy them sometimes,” Michael said quietly, as a shrieking Kali, knife in hand, chased Gabriel through the Main Hall with murder in her eyes.

Castiel startled with surprise. Michael barely spoke to him at all, so to be offered such a personal thought by his stoic brother and King was a rare and precious moment.

Gabriel was ducking and diving around the tables, occasionally lobbing a plate or cup through the water in his mate’s direction, as he evaded the incensed princess with well-practiced skill. This was far from the first time an argument had escalated from their bedchamber out into the main hall.

Castiel glanced between the warring couple and the seated Hannah, Michael’s mate, who was regarding the violent display with cool dispassion in her ice-blue eyes. Her elegant fingers never dropped a stitch from her intricate embroidery, even when one of the hurled plates narrowly missed her own head.

At Hannah’s side, Michael’s two pups, Hester and Samandriel, both sat as rigidly and calmly as their mother. They had acquired both their mother’s precise manners and Michael’s cool demeanor.

Twins, both Hester and Samandriel were nearly ten years of age now. Far older than he had been when he had begun his own adventures with Dean, but he couldn’t imagine either of them wrestling seals or tracking sharks by following the spoor of their blood trails.

No more than he could imagine his disciplined, traditional, and, honestly, exceedingly boring, oldest brother encouraging them to do so. Castiel couldn’t imagine such a breach of protocol would ever be tolerated by Michael, who was a fair and just King but hardly one of whom histories would be written.

“I believe, although Hannah is not your ‘truemate,’ she is most certainly well-suited to you,” he replied diplomatically.

Michael cast a fond glance in his mate’s direction. “Hannah is a superb mate and a most excellent mother,” he agreed. “Far more suitable a mate for me than one such as Kali would have been.”

Yet he stared at Gabriel and Kali who had now dropped their weapons and were simply racing each other around the hall in what seemed to have transformed into a much-better-natured game of tag. From the look of glee on Gabriel’s face, it appeared he was now more eager to be caught than not. “I wonder sometimes, though, how it must feel to have passion such as they share.”

“Perhaps that is something unique to truemates,” Castiel suggested carefully.

“So the legends say,” Michael said, with a peculiarly wry smile and darkly hooded eyes. “So the legends say.”

**xxxx**

“Aren’t you supposed to be hunting with your father today?” Castiel queried, though his protest was half-hearted as Dean, holding him by the hand, dragged him out northwards towards the deep water of the Harribean Trench.

“I don’t care. He’ll cope. You’re eighteen now. So it’s time we got serious about this.”

“Serious about what?”

“Teaching you how to fight.”

“I don’t want to learn how to fight.”

“I don’t care,” Dean replied mulishly. “If you think I’m gonna let you ever go swimming off into the blue without knowing how to hunt and fight like a boss, you’re sadly mistaken, Cas. By the time you’re twenty-one you’re going to be the best damned warrior that Atlan has ever seen.”

“I don’t want to be a warrior and I definitely don’t want to go anywhere,” Castiel said, pouting and deliberately dropping the three-bladed hunting knife Dean handed him before crossing his arms in protest.

“Good, ‘cos I don’t want you to go,” Dean answered. “Pick up the damned knife, Cas.”

“I have claws. I don’t need a knife,” Castiel pouted.

“Claws are for opening clams and catching fish. Won’t do you much good against something like a shark. I don’t know where you’re going, but sharks are going to be a given.”

“What if I don’t go anywhere?”

Dean shrugged helplessly. “Dunno. I thought once that thing triggered, it’s going to be a compulsion you can’t ignore.”

“I could take it off,” Castiel suggested weakly. “Until my twenty-first birthday, it can still be removed. I could just put it away for the next generation’s ‘chosen’ one.”

“Yeah. Just ignore your mother’s dying wish and thousands of years of tradition and tell the whole of Atlan ‘screw you’,” Dean scoffed. “Sure. Of course, you’re going to do that.”

“I could though,” Castiel pointed out.

“You could. But you won’t,” Dean said, and Castiel was sure he heard a little bitterness in the comment.

“I might,” he challenged, though they both knew he wouldn’t.

“If you did, you’d probably get banished,” Dean said. “Atlan is all about tradition. The citizens would all revolt and say you would bring the wrath of Pontus down on their heads if you turned your back on your prophesied Destiny.”

“Probably,” Castiel agreed. “I imagine stones and pitchforks would be involved.”

“Unless the long, torturous lectures from King Michael bore you to death first,” Dean said, rolling his eyes.

“Michael is a good King.”

“He’s a boring fart,” Dean stated.

“But also a good King,” Castiel pointed out.

“Who won’t hesitate to banish you, brother or not, if you deny your Destiny.”

“He’d cast the first stone,” Castiel admitted.

“Which would suck.”

“Yeah.”

“But if you were banished,” Dean said. “I’d go with you. Just sayin’.”

“You would?”

“Of course I would. Now pick up the damned knife and defend yourself.”

**xxxx**

“I could simply pull the necklace off before it activates and drop it into a deep trench,” Castiel said, as they floated together, hand in hand, on the surface of the ocean.

It was a variation on a conversation they had repeated, endlessly, for almost three years.

The moon was full and fat, bathing their bodies in pale, silvery light.

If he squinted, he could see the face of Pontus in the shadows of its surface.

“Imagine the scandal,” Dean chuckled lightly, though he squeezed Castiel’s hand in support.

“I love you,” Castiel said. “I can’t ever imagine loving anyone more than you.”

Dean choked little, his voice rough and hoarse as he finally said, “But you will, Cas. One day soon you will fully become an adult and leave here, and go on your adventure and you will find that person and they… they will become your whole world and you’ll forget about me entirely.”

“NEVER,” Castiel shouted.

“Shhhhh,” Dean said, squeezing his hand tighter. “You will, and… and that’s okay, Cas. That’s okay. It’s how it’s meant to be. We’ve always known that. I’ve always known that. That you aren’t mine to keep. It’s been nice to pretend, now and then, but we both know that’s all we’ve been doing. And it’s okay, Cas. Because no matter who you meet, or how happy they make you, and I pray every day that they do make you so happy you forget all about me, still, I will have had this. I will always have this. I will have all these memories of our times together and no-one, not even your truemate, will ever be able to steal them from me. Whatever happens, you’ll remain my one and only ‘bestest, truest friend, forever’, Cas.”

And Castiel, staring at the unforgiving face of the moon, blinked back tears and solemnly repeated, “Bestest, truest friends, forever.”

And hated that, for him, ‘forever’ had an expiration date.

His twenty-first birthday.

**xxxx**

Castiel had been waiting ten years for his twenty-first birthday, with an equal amount of dread and anticipation.

So perhaps it was not surprising that his necklace jumped the gun, as though it, too, couldn’t wait a moment longer to prove to the world that it was Dean who was his truemate.

He wasn’t a pup anymore. He had long since lost the idea that a truemate was just another name for a best friend.

Bestest, Truest Friend, Forever.

But there was no reason his best friend couldn’t also be his truemate. Surely, if anything, his truemate should be his best friend.

Because, although he had never spoken his wish aloud to another person, least of all Dean himself—his brave, bold, fearless friend was peculiarly fragile, either insisting on joking about it or instead stubbornly non-communicative whenever the subject of the Destiny Stone was raised—Castiel had privately become convinced that the whole situation was nothing more than a humongous, terrible misunderstanding.

The way he reasoned it was thus:

At the time of his own naming ceremony, Dean hadn’t even been born. And when Dean was born, Lady Maré was living thousands of miles south with the equatorial Wildlings.

So when Rowena had prophesied that Castiel had a truemate and would have to follow the Destiny Stone thousands of miles to find him, it had, at that point, been a perfectly valid idea.

But then Dean’s family had made the totally unexpected decision to move northwards to Atlan.

So Castiel and Dean had simply found each other without the aid of the Destiny stone, making its original purpose completely redundant.

And that meant the stone wasn’t going to lead him away from Atlan at all.

The pull he was feeling, the urge to dive into the ocean and swim, swim, swim to his mate was only going to draw him the few miles to wherever the Royal Guard were hunting that day.

South, the stone said.

Swim south, the stone said.

Go now, the stone said.

South, the stone said.

Now, the stone said.

South.  
Swim.  
Now.  
Go.  
Go.  
Go.  
Go.

And he was so sure of where it would lead him that he didn’t even bother picking up the bag that Dean had so carefully provisioned for his ‘journey’. He left the Inner Palace with nothing more than hope and his trident blade. Even the knife was only slipped into its sheath on his armband out of habit, since there was rarely a day that Dean didn’t haul him out to practice hunting or fighting.

So Castiel swam through the palace gates like an eel, his Destiny stone hauling him forward as though the necklace were a leash by which the glowing gem could drag him.

“Where are the Hunters this morning?” he yelled out to the gate guard.

“South of here, down by the Ciscona trench,” the guard replied.

But all Castiel heard was SOUTH.

South, the stone said.  
Swim south, the stone said.  
Go now, the stone said.  
South, the stone said.  
Now, the stone said.

And so he swam.

Towards Ciscona.

Towards his truemate.

Towards DEAN.

**xxxx**

“Castiel,” Dean cried, alarmed, surprised.

Hopeful.

Because his stone was glowing so hotly it was as though he had reached up, captured a star from the night sky and slung it around his neck.

And despite following it true, swimming like an arrow in an unerring straight line, he had reached the fish shoals of Ciscona Trench and there directly ahead, his scarlet tail glowing like the Sun itself, Dean was before him.

“DEAN,” he yelled, excited, ecstatic, “It triggered early. It led me straight here. To you…”

As he touched Dean, he felt a burst of heat explode out from deep within his chest, saw his own skin suffuse with a deep blue bioluminescence that then rose from his flesh like vapor and reached out through the water towards his beloved. He saw Dean’s body glow in response, as his soul, red like fire, emerged to meet his own. He saw the edges of their souls meet in the space between their bodies, the contrasting colors tentatively kissing each other before beginning to touch, to mingle, to bleed into each other, until the boundary between them colored violet as they began to merge into one.

And he and Dean were embracing, crying, hugging, both so overcome with relief, with joy, with mutual understanding that they were bestest, truest friends forever and forever did NOT have an expiration date because…

And then the stone blazed around his neck—whiter, hotter, burning like acid against his flesh.

And with a violent ripping sound, their entwined souls tore apart, the edges shredding into ragged, bleeding streams of violet light, and the pain was so terrible, so huge, as their souls ripped apart once more that it felt as though his very heart had been savagely torn in two.

And then the gem pulled his necklace taut as it pulled over Dean’s shoulder, relentless, demanding, still pointing South, still leading him away from Atlan.

South, the stone said.  
Swim south, the stone said.  
Go now, the stone said.  
South, the stone said.  
Now, the stone said.  
GO.

“NOOOOO,” Castiel wailed, pulling at the necklace as though he could rip it from his neck.

But it wouldn’t break, couldn’t break, wouldn’t let him escape its demands.

South, the stone said.  
Swim south, the stone said.  
Go now, the stone said.  
South, the stone said.  
Now, the stone said.  
GO.

And it was Dean, his shoulders slumped, his face a mask of misery, his eyes dark and haunted with grief, with pain, who reached out gently, softly and grasped his hand, working his fingers free, squeezing them gently, reassuringly.

“It’s not me,” he said, his voice choked, “It was never going to be me. I knew that. Knew better than to even hope. Your Destiny is waiting for you Cas. You need to go. You need to find him, Cas. He’s waiting for you and he’s waited long enough. Go find him. Go make him happy. Go be happy.”

“But I wanted it to be YOU,” Castiel sobbed. “Why isn’t it you?”

Dean shrugged again, looking sick, “Guess I don’t deserve you, Cas. But that’s okay. I never really dreamed I could be that lucky.”

“But I love YOU,” Castiel growled.

“I know,” Dean said. “But, hell, it’s not like you ever got a choice, is it? How can I be the one you choose if you’ve never even been offered the option of anyone else? How can I truly be your best friend if you’ve only ever had one friend? Just think, if you feel like this about ME, well, hell, imagine how good it’s going to feel when you meet your real truemate.”

“I can’t… I won’t…”

“You will,” Dean told him, with infinite sadness. “Just do one thing for me, huh? Before you go. Before I never see you again?”

“Anything,” Cas swore.

Dean swallowed heavily. “Kiss me,” he begged. “Just once. Just give me that much to remember you by?”

And so Castiel did.

Neither of them had kissed before. So at first it was awkward and strange, their noses clashing as both struggled to find a natural way to press their lips together, their hands fumbling, uncertain whether to hug or to hold or to keep their arms at their sides. And, for a moment, it felt like their one and only kiss would be nothing but an awkward, embarrassing disaster.

And then Castiel’s lips touched Dean’s and, with a soft aaaghh of surprise, his eyelids fluttered shut and his arms closed tightly around Dean’s shoulders and the noise of the ocean around them faded away until all he could feel was the rapid beating of their hearts, as their chests pressed together and nothing but skin separated them.

He traced Dean’s lips with his tongue, softly, gently, following the curve of his full lower lip, then the contours of his cupid’s bow.

He could feel the blood coursing through his whole body, his nerves tingling from the tips of his fingers to the fluke of his tail. He felt the moment their heart beats aligned, beating as one, and he knew, he KNEW, the gem was wrong. It HAD to be wrong. Because nothing, and no-one, could be as perfect as Dean.

He was sobbing as they broke apart, feeling shattered, broken, destroyed.

It was Dean, as always, who was the strong one, the brave one. Dean who forced a smile onto his face and a half-hearted, cocky sneer onto his face. “Make sure, when you find them, they kiss better than me, okay?”

“Dean… I…”

“Go. Be happy, Cas. GO.”

Go, Dean said.

GO, the stone said.

South, the stone said.

Swim south, the stone said.

Go now, the stone said.

South, the stone said.

Now, the stone said.

GO.  
GO.  
GO.  
GO.  
GO.

And, with a final choking cry, Castiel span in the water, flicked his tail, and swam south.

He didn’t look back.

Couldn’t look back.

He left Dean floating in the water, alone, rejected, and swam to find his Destiny.


	3. The Singer And The Song : Part Two

_**“Singing is the sound of the soul.”** _   
_**― James Runcie** _

_**“When you loved someone and had to let them go, there will always be that small part of yourself that whispers, "What was it that you wanted and why didn't you fight for it?”** _   
_**― Shannon L. Alder** _

Blinded by tears, Castiel swam south through the Ciscona Trench in the direction of the open seas that formed the true ocean.

On and on he swam, until his body felt as numbed with exhaustion as his mind was numbed with sorrow.

Past cavernous reefs, through swirling eddies and swift underground currents that cut at angles across his path, mercilessly battering his body and forcing him to fight to maintain his direction until, finally, exhausted, starving and heart-sick he realized he had no choice except to find somewhere safe to rest well before he left the wide channel protecting him from the dangerously erratic currents of the open Ocean seas and faced the wild capriciousness of the deep.

He was thankful for Dean’s training, even though that thought alone was enough to set him off on a fresh torrent of tears, because without the time Dean had taken to show him how to seek shelter in the most inhospitable of places he doubted he would survive even the first night.

There were no cities here, nor caves, nor even wreckage of land monster vessels to conceal himself within.

And the problem with being a ’civilized’ Mer was that it had been hundreds, if not thousands, of years since the inhabitants of Atlan had required the use of their ‘natural’ survival instincts. Particularly the pampered royal inhabitants. Castiel’s sheltered upbringing would have left him ill-prepared for this venture had Dean not been so insistent he learned the tricks Dean had acquired from his Wildling father.

Which naturally caused him to wonder about his mother, Queen Naomi. He knew, of course, that she had originated from a kingdom far to the North, where the sea was so cold it apparently froze completely in places and he knew the creatures that inhabited those most Northern seas were behemoths such as whales and walruses. But unlike the Wildings or the Khalessi, the northern Scanda were reputed to have been ‘civilized’ even longer than the Atlans. So he wondered who had taught Naomi the necessary skills to follow her Destiny. Had she too had a friend like Dean or had the Scanda somehow found a better way to balance civilization with natural instincts?

It was already colder in the open seas than he was used to. Despite the climate reputedly becoming warmer the further south he traveled, the odd degree of overall temperature rise at the surface was more than negated by the chill caused by the unfamiliar depth of the water he was traversing. Although he knew from Rowena’s books that Mer could theoretically adapt to survive in any temperature of habitat, there was still a necessity to gradually acclimatize to change. The sea was so much deeper here, towards the true Ocean, than it was in the sheltered area where Atlan nestled between the two shorelines of nearby temperate continents.

Which meant the useful trick Dean had taught him of simply burrowing into the sea bed to hide from predators was still something Castiel wanted to reserve as a last option. It would be so cold, right down in the depths of this particular stretch of water, that he doubted he would get much rest at all.

But Dean had taught him more than one solution to his immediate problem.

So, with that in mind, he swam upwards to the surface of the water, thankful to find it not only significantly warmer but also calm enough that he could bob on the gently swelling waves as he considered his options. From his memory of Rowena’s maps and an estimate of his own velocity, he calculated he had probably only traveled a little more than half the way down the channel between continents and it would take a whole further day before he reached the place where the channel widened onto open Seas.

He looked towards one of the distant shores until he saw what Dean had advised him to look for and, there, some distance along the coast, there was a high skyline of steep cliffs. He swam towards them along the surface, swiftly diving through and over the shallow swells of the sea like a porpoise, until he found exactly what he was looking for. A stretch of cliff that rose like a monolith from the sea below. No beaches or inlets. Not even any ledges carved by the waves upon which seals or sea lions or even large birds might be nesting. But the choppy white water at the base of the cliff suggested the presence of fallen rock beneath the surface that might offer defensible shelter.

Satisfied the area was not approachable by the land it was adjacent to, Castiel dove under the waves and hunted for a safe haven. Thankfully, the fallen slabs of granite that nestled at the base of the cliff had formed a rough natural reef teeming with marine life. As he searched for a place to rest safely, he was able to grab handfuls of kelp (not his favorite foodstuff but his empty stomach didn’t care) and, more encouragingly, clusters of mussels and whelks and even a large, fat crab that failed to scuttle to safety faster than his claws shot out to spear it.

And fate smiled on him, on that first night spent outside of Mer habitation, because he found a place where several rocks had fallen together to form a rough ‘cave’ area with a narrow, barnacle-encrusted entrance and when he peered cautiously through the gap he found no sign of prior occupation. Still, he was cautious enough to locate a stone almost as large as the entrance and after hauling it over to the entrance he pushed it through. It landed heavily enough to fill the interior with a sandy mist before the water cleared once more.

Then, clutching his bounty of seaweed and crustaceans, he entered the cave, used the stone to block the entrance as much as possible and then, curling his tail around him, he settled down to eat and sleep.

He did sleep, but not well. He was restless, not only because of the unfamiliar surroundings, though they alone caused him to startle every time he heard a noise or smelt the tang of unfamiliar creatures in the water that wafted through his hiding place, but also because every time he closed his eyes and tried to clear his thoughts, his mind filled with his last sight of Dean, with the shattered look on Dean’s face, with the wry lack of disappointment on Dean’s face.

It was that, somehow, that cut deeper than all else.

That Dean might have wished for Castiel to be his truemate but had never truly believed it might be so. Dean had, as he’d said, known ‘better than to hope’. Had not even dared dream.

As though the failing was his alone.

As though he were not worthy.

And Castiel cursed Rowena and his mother and the Destiny Stone and, most of all, himself that he had ever been the cause to make Dean doubt himself so much.

Dean, who was _everything_.

Except, apparently, Castiel’s truemate.

**xxxx**

Although his Destiny stone still pulled on his thoughts, waking him from his restless slumber with a loudly insistent chant of ‘Go South, Go Now’, its visible glow was substantially muted the following morning. Perhaps, in some way, the inanimate object understood that it would be unsafe for him to travel through dangerous waters glowing like a fallen star. Or perhaps the rumors were right and the stone would remain largely quiescent until he reached the end of his journey, only lighting up significantly once more when he had finally reached his Destiny.

Dean, his heart insisted. Dean is my destiny. Dean. Dean. Dean. Dean. Dean.

South, the stone insisted heartlessly.

Go South.

Go NOW.

Go. Go. Go. Go. Go.

And so, despite his grief, his doubts, after breakfasting on crustaceans and seaweed again (though, sadly, no crab this time), Castiel set off in a southerly direction once more.

He remained in the warmth of the shallow waters, hugging the shoreline for miles until the cliffs petered away to rolling dunes and flat beaches and then he moved towards the center of the channel once more, descending lower in the water until he was gliding like a shark rather than leaping through the swells like a dolphin.

Away from the cliffs, he dared not remain any closer to the shore despite knowing the waters would be warmer and the chances of natural shelter would be greater near the rocky ledges where the sea shallowed to beaches. It was not only the heightened chance of encountering land monsters that caused him to be wary of this lower shoreline. Sea lions pupped along the jagged rocks and gravelly beaches and he was not prepared to risk an encounter with 2000 pounds of enraged protective female or, even, a male eager to defend his territory against any potential usurper.

Although, should he meet a solitary seal, Dean had advised him to follow it to its hunting ground if possible since it would be unlikely to see him as a challenger and more likely to welcome the brief opportunity to hunt in a pair. “They’re antisocial assholes as a rule, but they know where the best shoals are so it’s worth making nice with them,” Dean had told him.

But it wasn’t a seal he met that day, as he made his way towards the ocean through a slipstream that cut through the middle of the channel and avoided most of the cross-currents.

It was a shark.

A blue shark, fortunately, so not guaranteed to look at him and immediately think “mmmm, sushi” since blues tended to prefer relatively small prey like fish and common squid.

But since she was a good 10 feet in length, with sharp teeth as long as his hand, Castiel had little doubt that if she decided a Merman might prove a nice mid-day snack, he would be hard-pressed to escape without at least one shark-sized chunk missing from his tail.

It soon appeared, though, that she was simply traveling in the same direction as he was and surfing the same slipstream. Which made sense, he supposed, since blue sharks were predators of the open ocean so she was probably simply journeying home. Why she was in the channel in the first place, though, was intriguing. And Castiel was never satisfied with an unanswered mystery.

So he asked her, after they had swum along in relatively peaceful silence for several long minutes. The relatively not being the ‘silence’ but the ‘peaceful’ because Castiel was hoping she wasn’t glancing at him sideways from her flat, black eye, and measuring him up as a potential dinner but he wasn’t totally certain.

“One mother of a bad storm out at sea a few days ago,” she told him. “The cod always try to head for calmer waters when a squall like that comes up. Knew if I came up this river here I’d find a whole bunch of them swimming around in pointless circles. I do like a nice bit of cod.”

“I haven’t seen many fish around here,” Castiel said. He didn’t bother remarking on the fact they weren’t in a ‘river’. He supposed to a creature more used to living in the wildness of the open ocean, the tamer sea of the channel would seem as tiny as a river.

“Of course you haven’t,” she replied, turning to offer him a wide, exceedingly toothy grin. “I already ate them all.”

Which made a lot more sense of why she was just peacefully escorting him out to sea, he decided. She was too full of cod to bother with a snack that might fight back.

He politely introduced himself, deciding good manners could only ease the tension between them, and told her he was planning to enter the Ocean for the first time so would be grateful for any advice.

“My name’s Meg,” she told him. “And I’m a shark, not a nanny. Figure it out for yourself.”

Which effectively ended their conversation for several hours before, possibly regretting her earlier snark or, more likely, just out of boredom, she sighed deeply and then asked him what he was doing in the ‘river’.

“Woah,” she said, when he told her. “Pretty damn stupid idea, if you ask me. As if just keeping your belly full isn’t hard enough already without adding a load of true mate nonsense to it. Still, it’s not just you Mer-types that do it. Gary told me that Great Whites do that kind of stuff too. The whole travel thousands of miles to find one unique special mate with the idea you’ll stick with that mate forever. Weird. Who needs it? Blues like me are, well, we’re more the free-love type if you know what I mean? We do the do and that’s it. Move on. No mess. No complications. No commitments. In fact, that’s where I’m heading now. Just looking for someone to have a bit of no ties fun with before I head back to the fish spawning grounds.”

“Who’s Gary?”

The shark was silent for a while, then said, “Gary was a traveling companion of mine. We spent a whole season once over to the east a bit, where the waters are calm and shallow and the Herrings there are plentiful and stupid. No, really. You can just lie on the bottom of the ocean with your mouth open and the idiots just swim on in by themselves. Gary said it was the fault of the Land Monsters. They hunt those seas so heavily that the Herring are barely old enough to spawn before they immediately get harvested and eaten. So all the sprats grow up with no elders to pass on any wisdom to them. I mean racial memory is all well and good, but it only gets you so far, you know? And, let’s face it, most fish are pretty stupid anyway.”

“The Land Monsters don’t hunt the sprats too?”

“Nah. Gary said they use something called a ‘net’ and it somehow only catches the big fish and releases the little guys. Probably magic. Dunno.”

“Was Gary a scholar then?” Castiel asked in surprise. None of Rowena’s books had ever suggested that sharks were ever interested in anything except their next meal.

“Dunno,” Meg repeated carelessly. “Don’t think so. He was a Sea Turtle. Real old guy. Ancient enough to remember when the Land Monsters still only used sailing ships. Guess if you get that old, you just naturally pick up a ton of knowledge along the way. I kinda miss him. He was good company. Knew lots of cool weird stuff. Never asked me to give him advice, though,” she added pointedly. “Still, you’re not that hard on the eyes. I guess if you want to hang around for a bit when we get to the Ocean, that’d be okay. Just don’t expect me to actually look after you. I don’t do that whole responsibility gig and I can’t imagine you wanting to hang around while I do the do with someone. Unless that’s how Mer get their kicks. Which is okay, though. No judgment here.”

Castiel abruptly revised his opinion of the shark. Perhaps the reason she was so prickly was because she was still sensitive about her friend’s death. “How did Gary die?” he asked carefully.

“Gary? Oh, I ate him.”

“You ate him?” Castiel repeated incredulously.

“Hello. I’m a shark,” she said. “Don’t look at me like that. It wasn’t my fault. It was night. I was bored. I was hungry. It seemed like a good idea at the time. He was a bit crunchy and stringy though, so not my best decision. But hell, I was in a bad mood at the time. You try living your whole life constantly on the move. Always awake. Always swimming. Everyone gets pretty grumpy when they’re tired and hungry, don’t they? Well, welcome to being a shark. I’m always tired and I’m always hungry. And now I’m lonely too, because I miss Gary, so I’m even grumpier.”

“Um… perhaps not the best idea for us to travel together then,” Castiel suggested, as he considered his own need for sleep. “Because I imagine you’ll be getting hungry again soon and I’d hate to become another source of regret for you.”

The shark offered him a baleful look from one of her black unblinking eyes. “Your loss. I’m a great traveling companion. No one ever messed with Gary when he traveled with me,” she announced, before flicking her tail and powering away from him in a flounce of temper.

“But then you ate him yourself,” Castiel muttered, as she sped away.

He was glad to see her depart, despite the crushing loneliness that descended upon him almost instantly.

He had forgotten what loneliness felt like.

It, however, appeared to recognize him well enough. It settled in and made itself comfortable inside his chest, filling the spaces left by Dean’s absence and then weighing there heavily like a dark specter formed of overwhelming grief.

And, he told himself, this couldn’t be right. This couldn’t be the true purpose of a Destiny stone, to rip him apart from the person he loved more than life itself. The person who completed him. The person who made him feel whole.

Their souls had risen for each other. They had touched. Had attempted to merge, to blend, to become one. The stone was wrong. It had to be wrong.

It wasn’t too late to ignore the howling protest of the Destiny stone, turn around and swim home, he told himself.

Even if that meant he was immediately banished from Atlan in disgrace.

_“If you were banished,” Dean said. “I’d go with you.”_

He could turn around. Swim North. Swim home to Dean. They could leave Atlan, find a home somewhere else.

Together.

_“Promise on your life that you will follow the path that it shows you, no matter where it leads?”_

_“Of course,” he agreed. “I swear on my life.”_

South, Go South. NOW.

GO. GO. GO.

With a groan of defeat, Castiel continued to swim south.

**xxxx**

At first, Castiel imagined it was a fleet of Land Water vessels drifting together in the water directly ahead of him, so huge and still were the dark shapes floating half-submerged above him just where the channel met the open seas. He almost changed direction purely to skirt around the edges of the ominous gathering.

Dean had warned him of the vessels that the Land Monsters named ships. They were the youngling form of the wrecks that littered the ocean floor. Dean had cautioned him that many of the ships dragged vast nets behind them as they cut through the waves, ready to scoop up all unsuspecting prey and simply drag them up, out of the water, to die a terrible slow death as they drowned gasping in the unforgiving air.

And although Castiel was of the Mer, one of the few creatures able to breathe as easily in land as in water since he had both gills and lungs, the nets were, in many ways, more dangerous to him than they were for any other denizen of the sea. Because whilst any other creature could hope until the last minute for rescue or reprieve, as a Mer, Castiel was bound to the covenant of his people that no Mer, live or dead, would ever allow themselves to be captured by the Land Monsters.

Like all of his people, he had a spell woven into his flesh, a dark ‘magic’ tattoo of spiraling blue lines. Small, inconspicuous but deadly. Activated by slicing through its lines with nothing more than one of the claws of his hands, it would steal his life force instantly and transform his body into the form of something that more closely resembled a nurse shark. Thusly, the Mer had successfully passed into legend and myth in Land Monster memory because even the passing of their lives left no physical witness of their prior existence and, peculiarly, through either magic or natural camouflage a live Mer could not usually be seen by Land Monsters.

Unless they were very young, or very old, or skirting on the edges of insanity in some fashion, Land Monsters could look directly at a Mer and see only a dolphin or a porpoise or something similarly innocuous. Rowena called the effect a glamor. Dean believed it was more simply just a lack of imagination, that the land monsters simply chose to see what they expected to see and their eyes consciously slid off anything that threatened their established world view.

Since he didn’t believe in magic, Castiel assumed Dean’s theory was more likely correct than a magical ‘glamor’ and he also thought that the tattoo was formed of some rare poison that lay dormant until the flesh bearing the sigil was ripped open to release it into the bloodstream. He hadn’t, admittedly, yet conceived of a scientific explanation as to how his body might physically transform itself into that of a shark. He was, however, confident that particular wisdom would eventually reveal itself.

Still, he was not eager to discover the answer to that question through direct personal experience so he intended to avoid all Land Monster vessels entirely.

But as he sought to change path, striving against the relentless chiming of the Destiny stone whenever he ventured to deviate from its preferred path, a wave of sonics struck him. Low, harmonious but as sad and despairing as a dirge. And although the song was unfamiliar, the identity of the singers was not.

What he had initially imagined to be ships were actually whales.

The merpeople of Atlan did not consider the whales to be allies. Their relations were cordial but cool with most other species. They did, however, have a non-violence pact in place with those whales who frequented Atlan waters. When the whales passed through Atlan territory during their seasonal migrations, they left the Mer alone and were, in turn, allowed unmolested passage.

So far from his home waters, Castiel had no assurance the same pact held true. However, he couldn’t perceive of any situation in which enmity between whales and Mer made any logical sense so he thought it reasonably likely that the whales would allow him safe passage through their midst.

Again, though, he heard Dean’s voice in his head. The memory so strong it was as though he heard the words spoken aloud. “Trust is great. Trust is good. Verifying is better. Never assume a situation is safe, Cas, no matter how much your instincts insist there’s no danger. Always double-check.”

So he paused mid-glide and sang a note of query towards the whales. A low, single pure note through the dark water.

I am here, it said.

I am Mer, it said.

I am friend, it said.

And then he waited, patiently, not moving by even a flicking of his tail as, above his head, the behemoths of the sea considered his song.

And he waited.

And waited.

Because he knew of whales, even though he had never before directly encountered them himself. He knew they lived long lives of reflection. That they were poets and singers, philosophers and bards. Whales were creatures who took no decision without ponderous consideration.

Well, except when they felt threatened and chose to attack, of course. Then, they could move almost as swiftly as sharks.

And even as he remembered that unsettling fact, a song sounded from the whales.

You are here, it said.

You are Mer, it said.

You are friend, it said.

And, with a deep sigh of relief, Castiel flicked his dorsal fins and rose to greet them.

Conversing with whales, it turned out, was exhausting. A conversation that would take minutes between Mer took literal hours when one of the speakers was a whale. It seemed no word was ever uttered without careful consideration and whilst that was helpful in avoiding misunderstandings, it was immensely time-consuming.

There was, however, a considerable upside to that fact in that the whales proved to be considerate hosts to a visiting merman. The largest and oldest of the bulls, the one nominated as their spokesperson, insisted that Castiel should rest upon his body as they talked to both ease conversation and save him from hovering for hours in the water. Although Castiel could maintain a stationary position in the sea, doing so this close to the surface where the water swelled into waves was tiring and burned more energy than he had to spare considering his erratic diet and huge energy expenditure since leaving Atlan the previous morning.

“Why are you here?” he asked them.

“We wait,” the bull replied, after an interminable pause.

“For what?” he asked.

It took several hours before Castiel finally learned that the whales had ventured into these shallower waters to escape a terrible storm (presumably the same one Meg had mentioned) because they had calves too young to safely navigate the wild waves of the open ocean. The storm had passed and the whales had assembled to leave but one of the calves had not rejoined them in time. The calf had ventured too close to shore, then the tides had turned against them and the youngling, too slow and weak, had been beached by the retreating water.

So the whales waited, singing a song of despair, not knowing whether the tides would turn again before the calf perished. Or became too weakened to swim even if the tide returned to free it. Which was, he was told, a sad but all too familiar scenario.

There was nothing to be done except wait.

Yet whilst they waited, the risk of them all being caught by the Land Monsters grew ever greater.

Lying there, on the back of a creature so huge that Castiel couldn’t even imagine the existence of any natural predator to something so immense, it was almost inconceivable that the Land Monsters might have ships and weapons that might threaten it.

Yet the old bull assured him it was so.

Stranger still, the bull told him that many land monsters had been seen on shore by the calf’s mother; an army of legged creatures surrounding her youngling in a dark mass, before she had been driven away from her watch lest she too was stranded by the receding waters.

When he’d suggested, cautiously, that perhaps that meant the calf was lost anyway, the bull’s reply had stunned him.

It had been known, apparently, for the very same monsters that hunted the whales as prey to sometimes instead attempt the nearly impossible task of saving the calf by working together to move it back into the water.

“But why?” he’d asked, bewildered.

And the reply to that question had taken so long for the bull to consider that Castiel had fallen asleep long before it was uttered. The Dawn was rising before the whale finally woke him by saying, “Perhaps, it is simply that not all land monsters are monsters.”

**xxxx**

He had barely left the whales to their faithful vigil before his Destiny Stone demanded a course direction

GO, the stone said.

East, the stone said.

Swim east, the stone said.

Go now, the stone said.

East.  
Now.  
GO.  
GO.  
GO.

And so, instead of continuing towards the depths of the open ocean, Castiel found himself hugging the coastline as he followed the stone’s siren call. It gradually occurred to him that perhaps his destination had always been easterly and his initial direction had been merely to enable him to traverse the channel between the continents and clear the land mass to his left.

In all honesty, he was relieved by the directional change. He had been dreading the prospect of entering the deeper waters. The route he was following seemed to spare him the worst of the sea’s capricious nature. Besides, closer to shore, food was easier to locate. He found himself frequently swimming right through massed shoals of fish so vast that filling his belly was literally as easy as reaching out his hands and spearing silvery bodies with his claws.

As he swam eastwards, and the waters became even shallower and warmer, he sometimes even ventured far closer to shore where he could scoop up crabs and mussels and even oysters on occasion.

The coast stretched for many hundreds of miles in an Easterly direction. A seemingly endless monotony of lone travel with the shore to his left and the open seas to his right. Day after day passed until it seemed his whole life had become nothing but swimming and eating with the passage of time marked only by his need, occasionally, to find a safe place to sleep properly rather than snatching odd naps on the surface when the sea was calm and the night protected him from the view of any passing ships. Sleep was, he considered dryly, the only thing that was presently separating his entire existence from that of a shark.

For one who had been so used to passing time by filling his head with knowledge, it was a strange and unwelcome departure to have nothing to think about at all. Save for the demands of food, sleep and the ache of his overworked tail, Castiel had nothing to distract him from his thoughts. And always, incessantly, those thoughts returned to Dean. Moments they had shared together. How much Castiel missed him in his life. His smile. His laugh. How much the ache in his heart knifed more deeply than even the strain his overworked tail was feeling.

Memories.

Like the time he and Michael had been debating, shortly after their mother’s death and Michael’s ascendance to the throne. Well, Castiel had called it debating. Others might have called it an argument. But Michael had been insistent that the world was flat, despite all the Land Monster books Castiel had read that had taught him it was round. So Castiel had swam to Rowena’s cave and retrieved a map, returning to present it to Michael with satisfaction. Michael had rolled the map out, had gazed long at the colorful representation of the round earth, and then had said, “see, the map lies flat on the table, so the world is also flat”.

Castiel, after gaping with bewilderment for a moment at Michael’s bizarre logic, had attempted to explain that the map was only a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional reality. Michael had looked at him as though he were speaking some bizarre untranslatable language like lobster. And the whole assembled court had sighed and rolled their eyes, settling in for an undoubtedly interminable stalemate between the two brothers. No-one dared speak directly against the King but few believed Castiel to be wrong, so all those gathered just ducked and waited for the argument to eventually peter out.

Except for Dean.

Who, as always, raced to the rescue by loudly announcing that they both were wrong because it was patently obvious that the world was, in fact, the shape of a pie dish. “Otherwise, all the water would long since have spilled off the edges,” he announced, with a wide, infectious grin. “So the only thing that makes sense is a pie.”

Immediately most of the tension in the room eased, as people exchanged amused glances at his cheeky suggestion, though none dared actually laugh out loud until the King himself reacted to the comment.

King Michael of Atlan stared at the Wildling Half-blood, his face still a mask of grim annoyance for several minutes. And then his expression had cleared into an almost never-before-seen smile, and he had proclaimed a ‘royal decree’ that the world was henceforth to be known as pie-shaped.

That evening, the palace cooks had produced a magnificence they had named ‘World Pie’, a deep dish filled with delicacies originating from as many distant seas as they could. Shrimp, lobster, starfish, tuna, swordfish and even fat chunks of octopus. From then on, every time a dispute was raised in the Inner Court it was settled by a serving of ‘World Pie’. The dish became so popular that Gabriel and Kali could be virtually counted on to have a major disagreement every Friday.

Memories like that both warmed Castiel’s heart and shattered it anew.

Each time he found a sandy spot on the seabed near to the shore and burrowed deep, forming a tiny ‘cave’ from a small pile of gathered rocks and shells to protect his head, before burying the rest of his body from view under the sand, he thought of Dean. Because without Dean’s lessons of survival in the wilds, he knew he would long since have awoken inside the belly of a shark.

Lessons he had usually accepted from the young Hunter with such sulky bad grace that it still stunned him that Dean hadn’t simply given up on him altogether.

“You’ll learn how to survive out there on your own if I have to drag you out here every day until these things become instinct,” Dean had told him.

And each night, as he settled into his hiding place on the ocean floor, he wept with the knowledge that even these memories of Dean’s voice would eventually fade into nothing more than half-remembered dreams.

That one day he might not even remember Dean’s face.

The moon had filled and waned twice more before he saw dark ominous half-submerged shapes floating above him again.

But this time, the shapes were not whales.

There were three of them, moving in formation, with the same ponderous slowness of whales. But the only song these particular behemoths sang was death.

For, finally, Castiel witnessed the horror that Dean and Meg had named ‘nets’.

Each of the shapes, which Castiel now realized beyond doubt were ‘ships’, was dragging vast, heavy bladders behind them. Bladders formed of something that appeared to be woven green rope seaweed except that the color was not green and the ‘ropes’ were thicker than his fingers. The bladders were not solid shapes but more like loosely woven cloth because water and the tiniest of sea life flowed through them harmlessly whilst any creature larger than his hand remained imprisoned.

The necks of the nets were open wide, so it appeared any trapped creature should have been able to simply swim back out again. But the drag of each ship’s forward motion was creating a current that flowed backward too strong for any but the largest of fish to swim against.

The nets were vast. Stretching out for hundreds of tail lengths.

And the nets were more than half-filled already with creatures desperately battling to escape.

“Help us,” voices called. “Please help us.”

Hundreds of voices.

Perhaps thousands.

The net was bulging with trapped fish. Mainly mackerel but he could see cod and herring and whitebait and even dark huge shapes deep within that might be tuna or swordfish.

And, shamefully, his mouth watered a little at the thought of swordfish. It had been too long since he had eaten anything that substantial.

“Help us,” they all cried, in a chorus of despair.

The song the bull-whale had sung to suggest the Land Monsters were not all monstrous became laughable in the face of this horror.

Yet still, it seemed to him it would be hypocritical to judge the land monsters for doing exactly the same thing that he himself did daily. The difference was of scale not intent. The fish trapped within the net were all of the varieties he would not hesitate to eat himself if given the opportunity. It was, really, none of his business except for the fact the excessive greed of the land monsters stole the food from the bellies of those such as himself.

So perhaps he would simply have sighed and moved on had it not been for the flash of red he saw within one of the nets. A red as vibrant as a wildling’s tail. For a moment he thought… but no… the coppery-hue was, he realized, the flesh of a fat red snapper fish that had pushed itself through the tight throng at the base of the next so that it might look directly at him with its flat, silvery grey eyes.

“Free me, please. Don’t leave my mate forever wondering of my fate. Each year he meets me near the waters of our spawning, that we might bring new life into the world. I cannot bear that he will wait there every year for me for the rest of his life, never knowing why I will never return. Please, I beg of you. Not for myself, but for the sake of my truemate. Free me.”

He was surprised to understand the fish. It was rare for a creature so small to have a language complex enough to enable Mer translation. He was more surprised to hear it claim truemate status.

“Do all creatures have truemates?” He asked, his heart aching at the idea as he considered how many fish he had consumed during his life. Had every meal he had ever eaten left a mate bereft elsewhere? The thought was peculiarly distressing.

“Not all,” the fish assured him. “Not even many, to be truthful. Truemates are rare even in those such as yourself. Far rarer still in creatures such as I. But even some of us small ones are so blessed by Pontus. So that is why I beg your mercy. Not because I consider my life greater than that of any others here but because I do not wish to die knowing my truemate will wait and mourn me forever.”

Perhaps it was the flame-like color of her skin, or the power of her words, but all Castiel could see in that moment was the look on Dean’s face as he had turned away from him and swam southwards, never to return. He already could barely sleep for remembering that moment, for playing it in his mind on endless repeat whenever he closed his eyes. If he added this moment to his list of regrets, Castiel doubted he would ever sleep again.

“What would Dean do?” He asked himself, even as his body was already moving to enact the obvious answer.

The nets were moving so slowly as they dragged through the water that it took little effort to catch hold of them. To cling on with one hand whilst he used his other to saw against the rope with the sharp blades of his tri-edged knife. And even with his strength and the surprising ease with which his knife sliced through the netting, it still took most of the day before he had carved huge holes in each of the three nets. Even then, the effort seemed nearly pointless at times because the nets were filling from the front almost faster than fish were escaping out of the back and more fish fell dead from the holes he cut than swam to safety. All too many had already drowned, the press of the weight of their fellow prisoners crushing them to suffocation or holding them trapped so that they couldn’t move enough to pull sufficient oxygen through their gills.

So on and on he strived, cutting larger and larger sections from the nets until the majority of the fish inside had tumbled out simply from the gravity of the pressing weight that had previously held them trapped.

And most swam away, without even a murmur of thanks, fleeing swiftly back to their spawning grounds to resume their interrupted lives. He didn’t blame them. He, after all, was also a predator, as terrifying and potentially threatening to them as the nets had been. Their lack of trust over his motivations for helping them was hardly surprising.

Sadly, though, too many of the freed fish were past saving. They just dropped from the net and sunk like stones onto the seabed, never to move again. Their eyes already flat and dark with death.

He wondered, since they were already dead, whether it would be totally inappropriate to eat some of them himself.

He glanced guiltily in the direction of the red snapper, one of the few fish that had not immediately fled the scene.

“Don’t mind me,” she said, as though she could read his mind.

“Sorry,” he apologized sheepishly.

“No, seriously. Don’t mind me. Not like they’re going to come back to life, is it? You might as well make use of them before someone else does.”

“You don’t mind? It seems a little…um…inappropriate.”

The snapper laughed. “You gotta eat. Better them than you eating some other poor sap later. Anyway, it’s all circle of life crap, isn’t it? You eat us and, one day, you die and we eat you. Works out in the end. The land monsters though, sheesh, it’s insane. Don’t they realize if they keep killing so many of us at once that soon they’ll have nothing left to eat at all? Think they do the same thing on land?”

“I don’t know,” Castiel replied honestly. “Though greed appears to be the nature of the Hu. I believe it is one of the reasons my people returned to the far depths and removed ourselves from their memory.”

He collected one of the large sections he had cut from the netting and filled it with several dozen of the dead fish, prioritizing cod and herring over the less familiar or bonier fish. He liked the oil-rich taste of mackerel as much as any other Mer but, given the choice, he preferred his dinner with less bones and more meat when he was eating it raw. He carefully judged how much he could easily carry and how much he would eat over the next few days, and was forced to leave many good fish behind. But he had more than a sufficiency. In the chill of the water, the bodies wouldn’t spoil for several days and the more he took with him, the fewer additional fish would be sacrificed to his hunger over the next week or so.

Then he wished the red snapper luck in reuniting with her mate, slung the netting ‘bag’ over his shoulder and continued his journey eastwards, cutting through the water with an unfamiliar ease despite the burden he was hauling. Feeling lighter himself, somehow, as though his act of kindness towards the fish had gifted him with more than simply an unexpected food supply.

Perhaps because he had listened to his heart, rather than his head, he pondered.

But then that thought inevitably led him to consider what might have happened had he listened to his heart instead of the Destiny stone a month earlier, and all of his good feelings left him abruptly and, suddenly, the bag on his back felt heavy and awkward, its mass affecting the normal aerodynamics of his body, and swimming returned to feeling difficult and exhausting. As though, perhaps, the burden he was carrying was suddenly far heavier than simply the net of fish.

And yet he swam on as the stone continued its insistent chant of ‘go, go, go, go’.

He heard the commotion long before he swam close enough to see the cause of the disturbance. At least two dozen dolphins were chattering and whistling and squealing with rage. The Sonics of their distress calls flooded the surrounding waters, creating a wall of sound so resonant that even with the Destiny Stone to guide his way, Castiel still felt dizzy and disoriented. So much so he was certain the Dolphins were deliberately using their own echolocation as a weapon. Bouncing it out in so many random directions that the resultant echoes created a web of confusion.

Which highly suggested they were faced with a dangerous foe.

Castiel’s first instinctive reaction was to detour around the epicenter of the noise. Whatever was terrifying a whole pod of dolphins was unlikely to be anything he was in a hurry to meet himself either.

But overwhelming the call of his animal brain to flee was his ability to reason. And that reason reminded him that, unlike the mere non-aggression pact between Atlan and the whales, there was a historic alliance between his people and the Dolphins.

And, yes, he was a long way from Atlan and the chances were this particular pod of dolphins were not members of that alliance and, yet, Castiel found himself incapable of simply turning his tail and swimming away.

“What would Dean do?” he asked himself, a mantra that seemed to have become his personal religion.

And, unfortunately, since he knew exactly what Dean would do if faced with the same situation, Castiel decided he had no option except to square his shoulders, draw his trident blade and swim into the midst of the disturbance.

As his ears had already indicated, a pod of approximately thirty dolphins were circling so frantically that the water beneath them was swirling like a whirlpool. In their midst, being protected by the constant movements of the rest of the pod was a calf so small it appeared newly born.

And though it was too far away for him to discern the exact breed of the predator that had caused such a frantic reaction by the older dolphins, it was obvious from its size, shape and swim pattern, that the dark shape circling beneath the pod was a shark.

He watched as one by one the adult dolphins detached themselves from the group and approached the threat, not violently since they were ill-equipped for direct confrontation with a creature so perfectly designed to deal death but, fascinatingly, each of the adult dolphins deliberately passed the predator whilst faking an injury. The dolphins were pretending to be wounded, swimming awkwardly and slowly, trying to lure the shark from its fixation on the tiny pup, attempting to trigger its instincts to chase them instead.

It was a clever idea, Castiel decided. If the shark took the bait, the adult dolphin would be able to drop the illusion of injury and flee, hopefully drawing the shark far enough away to give the rest of the pod time to herd the pup to safer waters.

Unfortunately, the shark was ignoring the adults entirely, its attention purely focused on the tiny pup. It seemed prepared to wait indefinitely for the dolphins to drive themselves to exhaustion before it made its move against the pup.

The dolphins seemed to come to the same conclusion, changing their tactics and instead sending adults down in pairs to dive-bomb the shark, ramming into it with their considerable body weights before turning to flee swiftly before the predator could retaliate against their attacks.

But the shark, larger and swifter, shook off the attacks easily and although the water around it began to color a pale pink as evidence of injuries occurring, it was clear that the ones suffering wounds were the dolphins whenever they twisted and turned too slowly as they made their retreats.

There was nothing for it. Castiel was going to have to attempt to intervene. He had no illusions he could win a battle with a shark but common sense told him that if the creature was in the mood for a fight it would hardly be so fixated on the idea of catching the pup. Which suggested it wasn’t a great white or a tiger shark but something less aggressive. Perhaps a blue, like Meg, only looking for defenseless prey. If he was right, then being stabbed a time or two by Castiel’s dagger might be sufficient to convince it to look elsewhere for its supper. And yes, getting close enough to stab it would probably result in Castiel getting a nasty bite or two in the process but he’d survive those injuries whilst the pup had no chance whatsoever of surviving an encounter.

A blue he could handle, he decided. He’d seen Meg’s teeth up close and wasn’t sanguine about the idea of them piercing his flesh but, still, they were no sharper or more dangerous than his blade.

He spared an ironic laugh for himself, remembering the day he had told Dean he didn’t need a knife because he had claws. He missed that old naïveté.

He carefully detached his net of spoils, not wanting its weight to hamper his movements, and laid it on the seabed, fixing it in place with the weight of a couple of heavy stones, then swam directly to where the shark was circling.

And then halted in surprise.

“Meg?” He queried, half doubting his own eyes. Wondering whether maybe all blue sharks had identical markings because the odds of this shark being the same shark after the passage of so much time and distance were surely impossible.

“I thought you were supposed to be swimming south to find the great love of your life,” Meg drawled sarcastically. “Did you get lost or just wise up? “

“I thought you were heading into the Ocean to find someone to ‘do the do’ with,” he replied, equally dryly. “No takers?”

“I got bored after a while. Decided I missed the taste of herring. Wanted to grab some before the Land Monsters harvested them all. Got here too late though. But no worries. Nice little succulent baby dolphin will hit the spot just as nicely.”

“I can’t let you do that,” he said, apologetically.

“How about you just mind your own business,” she snapped, her black eyes regarding his knife balefully.

“Dolphins and Mer are allies. That makes it my business,” he said, with a shrug.

“Oh, you really don’t want to make an enemy of me, Princeling.” She smiled so widely that her mouth looked like a cave filled with deadly stalactites.

“I was actually thinking more along the lines of a civilized trade,” he said, as he recalled her comment about the herring. “I seem to remember you like cod too.”

Unsurprisingly Meg, who was a lazy hunter at heart, was totally open to the negotiation. Particularly since a guaranteed net full of herring and cod was worth a lot more than a prospective dinner of still uncaught Dolphin pup. Sadly, Meg’s skill as a negotiator soon proved to exceed Castiel’s since his original intention had been to offer to share the net with her and yet she departed with his entire bounty in her stomach, leaving him without a single fish for himself.

Still, he decided, as the shark disappeared smugly into the dark waters and the whistles and clicks of the dolphins gradually changed from panic to relief, he was getting used to hunger and he might go to sleep with an empty stomach that night but at least would do so knowing the Dolphin pup would survive another day.

Another benefit of his action was that the grateful Dolphins insisted he joined their pod for as long as they were all traveling in the same direction.

The invitation was a two-edged sword. There was considerable safety in numbers. Having the pod around him meant sleeping became far less fraught with danger and he thought that having any conversation would help to smother his constant yearning for Dean’s company. Yet he soon discovered that dolphins were not particularly enjoyable companions.

They were too loud, too talkative, too… well… cheerful for Castiel’s tastes.

It wasn’t just that their constantly buoyant mood was so at odds with his current miserable status. They reminded him far too much of the members of the Inner Court. The lesser royals who always scurried around singing their inane gossip at each other, a constant nonsensical buzz of noise that irritated his ears whilst telling him nothing significant. Just a wave of pointless words that all too loudly informed him nothing of any genius import.

And it occurred to him, as he found himself swerving yet again to avoid his path through the water coinciding with the route of one particularly tiresome individual that he really didn’t have the energy to talk with again, that perhaps his own perception of his own earliest puphood had always been a little skewed.

In the time before Dean had come into his life, when he was so lonely at times he had wanted to scream out loud for want of a ‘friend’, when he had felt so much like an outlier, like a ghost, so invisible and unwanted and even disliked, how much of the way the court had treated him had stemmed from his own behavior rather than from theirs?

His mother had said to him she had always believed him solitary by choice.

Castiel had believed her to be wrong.

Now, after several days with the dolphins, he was no longer so sure.

He had been bitterly, terribly lonely as a tiny pup. That wasn’t a false remembrance. Before Dean had entered his life, he had been a sad and solitary pup with no friend at all save for the Sea Witch. Yet the inner court, despite its lack of age-appropriate pups, had been filled with Mer who had always been chatty and cheerful gossips like the dolphins. And though Castiel remembered thinking those Mer had always deliberately ignored his presence, talking around and over him rather than including him in their conversations, now, as he found himself shrinking away from the loudest of the dolphins, deliberately shying from their highly vexatious sonics, from the irritating noise that made him shudder with distaste, it finally occurred to him that he had always behaved the same way.

Perhaps it had never really been a case of no-one ever wanting to talk to him. Perhaps it was simply that except for Rowena and Dean, he had never really cared to listen. Perhaps no one else had ever had anything to say that caused him to stop and actually hear them. Perhaps he had always projected an air of being antisocial and disinterested rather than just shy.

What was it that Dean had said? How can I be the one you choose if you’ve never even been offered the option of anyone else? And it had made sense, at the time. It was true. And yet, in its own way, it was also a big fat lie. Because Dean had moved into the Inner Court and had found no difficulty in making friends, in becoming popular and well-liked by all, even despite the unfair prejudice he had initially faced. Dean had effortlessly stormed the ramparts of public opinion and had defeated all resistance with nothing more than the power of his own gregarious personality.

“I didn’t choose to love you because you were my only option,” Castiel whispered to his memory of Dean. “I chose to love you because you were the only option. The only person I ever met, in my whole life, who made me want to stop and truly hear you.”

**xxxx**

Go North, the Destiny stone said, several days later after they had finally rounded the cape of the land mass.

And he was confused by yet another change of direction until it occurred to him that perhaps his ultimate destination had been due east from Atlan all along. Perhaps the stone had only meant to direct him south as far as the ocean, then east under that particular land mass, before leading him back upwards again in the true direction of his intended destiny.

Because, as he thought about it, he found himself considering his memory of the world map he had borrowed from Rowena’s cave. If he remembered correctly, heading northwards at this point would almost inevitably lead him back to the same approximate longitude as Atlan once more. Then the sea would curve eastward under land once more, some several hundred miles to the north of his current position. Perhaps, and his experience so far supported the theory, the Destiny stone was never intended to indicate his ultimate destination but, rather, a series of particular immediate directions within the entire journey he must make. It was less of a fixed compass than a constantly interactive navigation device.

Which briefly gave him pause as he considered the only eastern merpeople he knew of were the dusky-skinned Khalessi and, much as he understood that Gabriel seemed totally enamored of his fierce mate Kali, and her beauty was inarguable, she herself proudly claimed that all of her people had similar contentious personalities and the idea of a similarly fierce mate was not a prospect that enticed. He could perceive of no reality in which a similarly shrewish (if not actually psychotic) character could possibly be his truemate.  
The idea of being chased around a room by a harridan flinging plates and silverware in vengeance for some imagined slight was not his idea of a desirable relationship.

Sure, Dean was true to his Wildling blood. Dean was hot-blooded and impetuous and irreverent and daring and brave and strong, but he had never, in all of their years of acquaintance, treated Castiel with anything more than infinite tenderness. Strong, fierce but always so very gentle as though Castiel were something precious that must be handled with care.

So, no, Castiel mused, as he swam onwards. Impossible that his Destiny could be any less gentle towards him than Dean.

Turning north meant taking his leave of the Dolphins, since their own route was taking them Eastward into the deep Ocean. Parting company with them was both a sorrow and a relief.

Turning north also meant that he found himself still following parallel to the shoreline. Though in this new direction the waters warmed and shallowed, becoming calmer deep below and fiercer near the surface where it roiled into the waves of tidal forces.

Food became more bountiful in the shallower water. Shoals of silver mackerel slipped past him in numbers so vast he could reach out his hands and simply snatch a snack without even pausing. Despite the irritation of the way their tiny bones constantly caught between his teeth, he was glad of their oil rich flesh. His constant swimming and irregular diet had stripped his body of the soft padding afforded by his Atlan upbringing. He had always been relatively slim and Dean’s insistence on preparing him for his journey for the last three years had given him a degree of muscle. But after these months of journeying, he was reaching the wrong side of lean and every cord and sinew was sharply defined on his chest and arms.

Here and there he saw families of tuna and swordfish too and although the latter always caused his mouth to water, he otherwise ignored them. It wasn’t only that the call of the Destiny stone was too urgent for him to pause long enough to stop and hunt such a creature, for swordfish were fast and strong and violent prey, but he was also heeding the words of the red snapper that echoed in his brain. Words of wastefulness and greed, of the wickedness of taking more of the sea’s bounty than he could legitimately consume. As much as his stomach would appreciate being filled with a fat swordfish steak, he couldn’t justify the sacrifice of a creature that could feed a whole family. Better, more righteous, to leave the huge swordfish to live and grow and spawn until it eventually sacrificed its life to mouths far more needful of its succulent bounty.

So he satisfied himself with boney Mackerel and the odd crab and, a few times, flat peculiar fish he’d never seen before, either in the flesh or within Rowena’s books. Fish that were ugly and so strangely unappetizing to his eyes that he was cautious of them at first, fearing their odd, lumpy, speckled skin denoted poisonous meat. Yet, when he finally gathered the nerve to taste them, it turned out they were soft-fleshed and sweet on his tongue. So perhaps their peculiar skin texture and markings were merely protective camouflage.

He carefully skirted around a family of whales, despite his stone’s protest at the minor detour, because although he knew enough of their own language to sing easily with them and might, under other circumstances have been at least tolerated in their presence as he had been by those whales near the great Ocean, whales were capricious creatures whose communities could either be gregariously social or snootily exclusive and it was rarely possible to judge which variety you encountered until you were too close to them for comfort. And since these particular whales had a number of newly born pups in their midst, Castiel knew he was more likely to be attacked should he venture too closely.

It was with sadness though, that he skirted around them, because whales were migratory creatures who spent most of their lives in the cooler northern waters, only venturing to these more temperate climes to spawn their pups. The odds were high that within the passing of another moon or two they might round the cape in the direction from which he himself had traveled and then turn North once more and pass through the Atlan sea. He would have liked to have sent a message with them, as he had done with the old bull he’d conversed with before.

But then again, what song could he sing for them to pass to his people, pass to Dean, that would add anything to his previous one? That he was still alive? That he was still following his Destiny? That he still wasn’t coming home again? That he couldn’t come home again?

He suspected Dean had already figured that much out for himself.

Yet he so wanted to share his adventures with his friend. Bestest, truest friend forever. To tell him of the Land Monster prison nets and the Red Snapper, and Meg, and the Dolphins, and the beauty of the ocean and the terror of living outside of a city. Of the flows of the water, and the tides that dragged him towards shores and the currents that swept him towards the depths. It felt so wrong to be away from Atlan without Dean by his side.

To be anywhere without Dean by his side.

Selfishly, he wished Dean had come with him. That they might have ignored the reason for his journey and simply taken it together as though it were an adventure they were sharing.

“I miss you,” he said, floating on his back in the gentle swells of a calm sea, as he stared up at the sky and imagined Dean staring at the same stars and the same moon from a different sea, so very far away. “I miss you so much it feels like in leaving you I tore my soul asunder and left it with you and that part keeps calling me. Telling me to come home.”

And he wondered how the Destiny stone could possibly be taking him to meet his truemate, the other half of his soul, when Dean had already stolen so much of it for himself. Castiel couldn’t imagine how this mysterious truemate could possibly join with him and create a ‘whole’ when Castiel himself now had so little remaining soul to offer.

**xxxx**

Two more full moons filled and waned before he reached the place where the shoreline to his left joined with the land he had glimpsed on the northern horizon for several days. The waters here were not the blue of Atlan’s seas. The teeming kelps and abundant plankton refracted the light differently here, filtering everything in hues of green.

And, as he had expected, as soon as he entered the tidal stream that flowed to the right the message from his Destiny Stone changed once more.

GO, the stone said.

East, the stone said.

Swim east, the stone said.

Go now, the stone said.

East.  
Now.  
GO.  
GO.  
GO.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he muttered as he changed course to glide eastwards again. He was tired of the journey. Tired of swimming endlessly towards a future he was becoming increasingly certain he did not want. Tired of being carried like flotsam on the sea of fate without any choice of the future it would offer.

Because, and he’d given this much thought, how could anyone he met be more suitable a mate than Dean anyway? Looks could not be sufficient, since Castiel couldn’t perceive of anyone being more attractive than Dean and neither could he imagine any improvement on Dean’s personality. If pushed to state a flaw in Dean, Castiel would struggle to mention anything. Except, perhaps Dean’s self-deprecating manner.

And that said everything, really. Dean’s only flaw was his inability to accept his own worth.

The blame for which, Castiel increasingly felt, lay with him.

It was perhaps the distraction of these thoughts that prevented him from noticing any warning signs. Though it was equally likely the trap was simply too well set for anyone to see it before it was too late.

One moment he was swimming over seaweed encrusted rocks. The next, the entire floor of the ocean appeared to move beneath him and then, in the next instant, the green of the water was eclipsed by a thick dark cloud that spread quickly through the water and turned day to night.

Blinded by the sudden darkness, choking on the oily substance that coated his gills and filled his mouth with murky slime, Castiel didn’t see the first tentacle whipping towards him through the water until it had already wrapped itself around his tail, midway between his dorsal and his fluke and then, already choking and spitting out ink, he couldn’t prevent a scream of pain as the tentacle tightened around him with crushing, biting force.

He repeatedly stabbed at it with his blade, puncturing its thick, rubbery flesh and leaving triangular shaped wounds, whilst he used the claws on his left hand to fend off another tentacle that was attempting to curl around his waist.

It took over a dozen fierce stabs with his knife before the grip around his tail loosened enough for him to corkscrew himself out of its grasp, and he broke free and surged upwards in the water just in time to avoid two other waving limbs, twice as wide as his own arms, from connecting with his neck and upper torso.

He could feel the sting of salt burning into his flesh, where suction pads had grasped onto his scales and bitten deep, the tiny but sharp teeth cutting into his skin enough to leave round rings similar to those he had seen on Kali’s back.

Which was when he knew his foe, knew its name was Kraken and it would wrap its grasping arms around him and pull him into its mouth to crush him to death inside its gaping maw if he didn’t swerve and weave and bend through the water, rolling as he flicked his tail, changing direction left, then right, then soaring up and spinning, diving under and over and around as he evaded what seemed like dozens of waving, writhing limbs though he knew the squid only truly had eight fat arms and two longer, thinner tentacles.

He was fast and lithe in the water and the beast was slow. But it had ten limbs whilst he had only two plus his tail, and no matter how quickly he moved he still seemed to be surrounded, his body being driven closer to the creature’s mouth, and then one of its tentacles whipped against his shoulder and buried a hook into his flesh and he realized Rowena had been wrong. The kraken was not merely a Giant squid. It was a Colossal squid because it had hooks as well as teeth on the ends of its waving limbs.

He hacked savagely at the tentacle that had caught hold of his shoulder, slashing wildly, attempting to sever the limb rather than simply attempt to free himself from the hook because he had mere minutes at most before the rest of its limbs would inevitably close around him and then… with a squeal of pained distress and a fresh eruption of ink, the Kraken suddenly released him and shot backwards in the water, retreating completely.

Castiel blinked in confusion, barely able to see in the black inky water, unable to comprehend how he could possibly have wounded it enough to cause it to withdraw from the fight.

And then someone said, “Pointless to worry about the limbs. Always go straight for the eyes.”

He swirled around in confusion and, as the murky blackness of the squid ink dissipated enough that he could see clearly once more, he saw a blond-haired, green-tailed merman grinning at him. In his right hand the Mer held a long pointed spear and even though the water had already washed away most of the evidence, the spear was still dark with blood.

“Thank you,” he said, as he realized the stranger had almost certainly just stabbed the squid in one of its eyes with the spear and that was why it had released him and retreated.

“You’re welcome,” the Mer said. Then shrugged wryly. “Kind of my fault you got attacked, so it was the least I could do.”

“Your fault?” Castiel repeated, with a confused tilt of his head.

“A pod of passing dolphins spotted her yesterday and let us know she was lurking somewhere near here. My king told the guard to deal with it and today was my day to do squid duty. I meant to come out earlier this morning to drive her away from our territory but, well, there was a bit of a party last night and I overslept. You know how that goes,” he said, and winked suggestively.

Despite having absolutely no idea what the unfamiliar merman was talking about, Castiel nodded politely. “Well, I am exceedingly grateful for your assistance regardless,” he said. “I have heard tales of Kraken but had never before encountered one.”

“I was impressed by your fighting ability, but you took a knife to a spear fight and that rarely ends well. Name’s Balthazar of Trianolis, palace guardsman, and I’m very happy to make your acquaintance.” The blond waggled his eyebrows suggestively and winked once more.

“Prince Castiel of Atlan,” he replied, then proving he was not totally naïve added, “traveling in search of my Destiny and I’m afraid it is still directing me Eastwards.” And the gem at his throat flared a tiny amount as though to emphasize his words.

“Damnit,” Balthazar moaned. “Typical. I save an actual Prince from almost certain death but do I get a fairy tale ending? Nope, I don’t even get to claim a kiss as a reward. Oh well, such is my life.”

Still, he shrugged his supposed disappointment off easily enough because he immediately invited Castiel to accompany him to Trianolis so his wounds could be treated. The Mer City was in an Easterly direction anyway, he assured Castiel. “So perhaps I am not going to be lucky myself but, who knows? It might be that your true mate is one of my people. At the least, you should come check out our royalty for yourself. Most of them are a little too interbred if you know what I mean. Not to the point they have two tails or three eyes but, sheesh, they’re dumb. Couple of them are real pretty though. I mean I wouldn’t say ‘no’ to them myself. Just don’t expect any scintillating conversation.”

Castiel, so tired of his journey, should have welcomed the prospect of spending time in a city once more. A city that might even be that of his true mate.

Instead his stomach churned uneasily as he followed the green-tailed merman back to his city and he felt not a little nauseous. Though, he told himself, that was probably just caused by the pain radiating from his punctured shoulder and the sharp stinging of the sucker-bites on his tail.

Trianolis was far smaller than Atlan, yet had a unique beauty of its own. Rather than the dwellings being formed purely of volcanic caves, most of the habitations were clearly of deliberate construction. There were pillars and statues and all manner of ‘caves’ formed from blocks of rock in hues of whites and golds. It was named ‘marble’, Balthazar told him, and apparently much of the city had been built by Land Monsters.

“Several thousand years ago, this was an island protruding out of the sea and Hu dwelt here. But a sea mountain erupted and a huge wave rose on the surface and drowned this place and sucked it down to the bottom once more. So the Triani Mer have dwelt here ever since.”

The Triani all shared Balthazar’s coloration. Their hair color ranged from blond to black but their tails were all hues of green from lightest jade to deepest emerald. None, however, had eyes with the vibrant color reminiscent of Giant Green Anemone. None had eyes as beautiful as Dean.

In fact, as he dwelled amongst them for the next few days, accepting their hospitality gratefully as he waited for his shoulder to heal and the worst of the sucker-bites to fade from angry scarlet, he came to the conclusion that none of the Triani, for all they were blithe and carefree and all exceedingly attractive with their exotic green tails and skin as pale as the belly of a plaice, were a match for Dean’s beauty. And the princes and princesses were all, as Balthazar had warned him, both exquisitely pretty and as dim witted as rockfish. So he was pleased, and relieved, that the Destiny stone was still tugging him away from that place. Despite the private decision he had already reached, he would still have been discomforted to discover that fate had paired him with a mate as vapid as the Triani royals.

It was on his fourth day in Trianolis, when he was lounging with Balthazar within a coral reef filled with tiny fish so brightly hued that they reminded him of the rainbows he had seen from the surface of the sea, the arcs of color that sometimes arched over the sky after a storm, and remarking that the clownish behavior of a particular fish reminded him of the way Dean would often lurk behind rocks to pounce out and cause him to startle, when his companion abruptly threw his arms up in dramatic despair.

“Do you realize I have known you for four days, Castiel, and I still know very little about you. I do, however, have a comprehensive knowledge of this mythical paragon named Dean. You have described his looks and his form so clearly that I would recognize him if I met him myself. I know his favorite foods. His best and worst habits.”

“What worst habits?” Castiel demanded defensively. “I have never said anything amiss about Dean. He is truly the bravest, most beautiful, most caring and wonderful Mer you could ever have the pleasure to meet.”

“Annnnnd,” Balthazar drawled, “that is why I consider his worst habit to have been YOU.”

Hurt and confused, Castiel tilted his head and glared at the blond Mer. “I don’t understand?”

“Look, you’re clearly a nice guy, Castiel. You’re a Prince, so you could have just shucked me off when we got here and spent your time in the palace with all the other hoity-toits. Instead you choose to spend most of your time with a lowly guardsman, presumably out of some nonsensical sense of obligation to me for saving your life. So that tells me you’re loyal and you understand the true meaning of friendship and that the value of a person is in their deeds, not their position in life.

“And yet, knowing that, and listening to you talk, it is so obvious to me that Dean is the other half of your soul that I want nothing more than to bang both of your heads together until you come to your senses. What in the blue blazes are you doing here, thousands of miles from home, when there is clearly only one place you want to be?”

“It doesn’t matter what I want,” Castiel growled. “I have a destiny.”

“Yeah?” Balthazar sneered, unimpressed. “I gotta say that if ‘fate’ thinks this Dean guy is wrong for you, then ‘fate’ has been drinking a whole ton of fermented kelp juice and needs to go sober up somewhere and butt out of your business.”

Castiel worried at his lower lip, until the skin was rough and chafed, and then, in a low voice whispered, “can I tell you a secret?”

“Sure,” Balthazar agreed. “Not like I could betray it anyway. None of the other Royal types here would listen to anything a mere guard has to say.”

“I… um… I tried. A couple of times,” Castiel confessed, eyes haunted and guilty.

“Tried what?”

“When I was rounding the cape, a week or so after I left the dolphins and I had been totally alone for days and there was nothing to do but just swim, and think, and remember. And I was suddenly so sure this whole thing was a mistake. I tried to turn around. Tried to go home. But every time I turned against the stone it got louder and louder until I couldn’t hear anything except the stone and then I got dizzy and disoriented and couldn’t even work out whether I was swimming upwards or down, let alone east or west. It was ten times worse than the web of echolocation the dolphins used against Meg.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Balthazar agreed. “ I once was swimming near land when there was a rockfall from a cliff. The noise was so overwhelming that I lost my balance completely and just ended up swimming aimlessly around in the water. Before then, I had always thought I used my eyes to choose the direction I was going in, but I learned then that my ears were what controlled my tail.”

“Exactly,” Castiel agreed bitterly. “And that’s when I realized my Destiny was an inescapable curse.”

“Um, hate to state the obvious but why didn’t you just, um, take the damned necklace off?” Balthazar asked reasonably.

“I can’t. The thread that holds the stone might look fragile but it is unbreakable. Even my knife, that can slice through bone as easily as it glides through flesh, cannot sever the cord.”

“Damn,” Balthazar said. “It must be enspelled with the same magic as the Destiny Stone itself.”

Although Castiel was sure there had to be a scientific explanation, like Rowena had long ago told him, ‘magic’ was as good a word as any to describe science they did not yet understand and so he nodded his agreement to Balthazar’s suggestion.

“So you really believe Dean is your truemate?” Balthazar asked cautiously.

“Well, no,” Castiel replied reluctantly. “I can’t see how he can be, considering the stone insists my truemate is still out there waiting for me,” he said, gesturing eastwards with a flick of his hand. “But I have finally reached the decision that I don’t really care. Dean is, well, I suppose I could call him my soulmate. He’s who I want. He’s who I always wanted. He’s who I’ll only ever want.”

“And, yet, you’re still journeying East,” Balthazar pointed out.

Castiel shrugged. “I eventually realized there was no option except to continue obeying the stone until it leads me wherever it intends me to go. My plan now is to follow it all the way to my Destiny until I find my supposed ‘truemate’. I remember when Princess Kali arrived. Her stone went dormant as soon as she met Gabriel. It didn’t wait around for her to actually mate him. So I thought it could ask my supposed ‘truemate’ to remove the stone from my neck, and then I’ll apologize most sincerely for the whole terrible misunderstanding and return home to Atlan and pray that Dean hasn’t simply given up on me and mated another during my absence,” Castiel admitted sadly. “Which is entirely possible, of course. It would completely serve me right, wouldn’t it?”

“Who knows? You might even meet your truemate and change your mind,” Balthazar suggested. “You might take one look at them and be all, ‘Dean who?’. Roll your eyes at me all you like, but I’ve never heard of anyone meeting their truemate and simply turning tail and swimming away from them again.”

Castiel scowled unhappily. “I don’t believe so. But it doesn’t matter either way. I can’t see that I have any other option at this point except to continue following wherever the stone leads me,” he said.

They sat in moody, reflective silence for a while, just letting the tiny marine fish dart around them unmolested. No longer having an appetite for scooping them up and chewing on them like candy.

“I’m not a scholar,” Balthazar said, eventually, “and I know very little about magic. But seems to me that if your problem is a spell, your best option to deal with it might be to speak with a witch. It’s a really powerful spell, though, so I don’t think our sea witch will be of any assistance. She’s young and still far more enthusiastic than capable, I’m afraid. But a pod of porpoise came west a couple of years ago and mentioned there is a kind of king witch living in an underground cavern under an island only a few days East of here. You’ll have to pass it anyway, since it sits smack in the middle of the route you’ll take. There are a lot of islands between here and the Eastern Ocean but you’ll recognize the right place because its less of an island and more of a volcanic mountain that just happens to poke its head out of the sea.”

“I’m not particularly enthused about the idea of entering a live volcano.”

“It’s largely dormant but it’s snoozing rather than sleeping so it, well, burps now and then and that means the waters around it are unusually warm. If you find one of the eddies that are particularly hot, its source will be one of the tunnels that will lead you inside. If I were you, I’d go see the witch king of Miramen. He might be able to help.”

Hope sparkled in Castiel’s eyes at Balthazar’s mention of the volcano’s name. “I have heard of Miramen,” he enthused. “It’s the place where all of the sea witches gather on rare occasions to share their wisdom with each other. Twice I have known Rowena leave Atlan to visit such a conclave of witches, though I had no idea she had travelled so far on her journeys.”

It seemed to Castiel that if Rowena, the most intelligent and learned person he had ever met traveled to see this King Witch for advice then, yes, Balthazar’s suggestion was a wonderful one. Fate, as fickle a mistress as she was regarding his ultimate destiny, had apparently chosen to doubly bless him through Balthazar.

“You saved my life and now you offer me hope,” he told the green-tailed merman. “I can never repay this debt.”

Balthazar laughed. “I’d suggest exactly how you could repay me, but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life waiting to get knifed in the back by a vengeful Wildling half-blood. So let’s just agree you can pass it forward.”

**xxxx**

Castiel bid his farewell of Trianolis two days later, after the Triani healers had finally declared his shoulder well enough healed to avoid infection as long as he continued to pack it with a poultice of mineral rich seaweed and wrap it with a silver-infused dressing. He promised to be conscientious about following their advice because he agreed that swimming through unfamiliar waters with an open wound was unlikely to work out well for anyone. He would inevitably have a scar, they told him, but he had fortunately avoided any permanent nerve damage and within a few weeks would have full use of his left shoulder and arm again.

He was sad to bid farewell to Balthazar (though not the Triani Royal family) but, like the cheerful blond guardsman said as they made their goodbyes, if Castiel’s plan worked out then perhaps he would be soon be visiting the City again on his way home to Atlan. And that was a greatly cheering thought.

Since he was still slightly favoring his shoulder, it took him longer than predicted to reach Miramen. It was almost a full week later when he finally swam through a thin current of water significantly warmer than the flow he was surfing. Turning immediately into the hot current, he swam against its flow, following the heat back to its source until he found himself at the base of an undersea mountain that was honeycombed with tunnels.

There were several large enough for him to enter and there were no clues as to which of them he should follow. But he assumed the same principle would apply as in Atlan of all the lava-formed tunnels originating from one central hollowed cavern, so he decided it probably didn’t matter which route he entered by. He was glad of the glow from his Destiny stone as he traversed the winding tunnel that burrowed through the slumbering volcano. Perhaps it was some reflective property of the rock the tunnel was carved from or he was inadvertently still following the direction of his Destiny, because the glow from the stone seemed brighter than it had been for weeks. Its luminescence lighting the tunnel so well he could see each twist and turn without effort until it brought him out into a vast open air-filled cave, illuminated with several fiery torches similar to the flame that burned eternally in Rowena’s sanctum.

He floated, tail submerged, upper body in the air, pausing both to adjust to his body automatically swapping his oxygen supply to his lungs, rather than his gills, and to peruse the interior of the cave itself. To his intense disappointment, it looked nothing like a witch’s cave. It was not stuffed full of trunks and books and parchments and maps and treasures. All of the items that had irresistibly drawn him repeatedly to Rowena from the age of five, all the things that had appeared like feasts to the appetite of his insatiable hunger for knowledge, were lacking in this place.

“There’s nothing here,” he sighed, his shoulders slumping.

“That’s a matter of opinion,” a voice responded, its tone sharp with irritation.

He spun in the water, alarmed, until he saw someone was seated at a desk towards one of the far edges of the cave. Because he was seated behind one of the torches, he was largely in shadow. Only his face was clearly visible, and even that only seemed to be so because he was staring at some peculiar tome that seemed to be magically impregnated with light, since it was the page the witch was viewing that appeared to be the source of illumination of his features. A face that looked unimpressed with Castiel’s utterance. The face, presumably of the King of the Sea Witches. So insulting his home had probably not been Castiel’s best opening gambit.

“Forgive me if I sounded impolite,” he said carefully. “I was simply surprised by your… um… minimalist décor. I am more familiar with the notion that the natural habitats of witches are chaotic explosions of arcane artifacts and books.”

“That’s probably because most witches don’t have access to electricity, let alone computers,” the Witch King replied dryly. “Though it’s not a given. I think most of them like all the drama of having to root around in old books and scrolls for long forgotten spells.”

Castiel tilted his head and worried his lower lip before confessing, “I have absolutely no idea what you just said to me.”

“Then consider my situation more pragmatically. I’m living inside an unstable volcano. In what universe would it make sense for me to store priceless artifacts in a place prone to sudden larval eruptions?”

That was, Castiel decided, an excellent point.

“So, I assume your visit has a purpose other than to comment on my pressing need for an interior makeover?” the witch queried, arching an eyebrow sardonically and then rising from his chair and walking towards the waters edge.

Walking.

On legs.

“You’re a Land Monster,” Castiel exclaimed in horror, scooting backwards in the water with the intention of flipping his tail and fleeing back down the tunnel to escape what he now assumed to be a trap.

“Well, that’s just rude,” the witch snapped, and perhaps it was his memory of Dean saying the same thing all those years ago but it was enough to pause Castiel in the act of fleeing. “I’m a human,” the Witch continued, “and yes I agree that many humans deserve the title of monster. But I am not one of them. Well, I suppose other humans might beg to differ since I am, also, a Sea Witch.”

“How is that possible?” Castiel demanded. “You are Hu. You are not of the sea.”

The witch huffed and rolled his eyes impatiently. “Okay, so if you want to be pedantic I guess it’s more accurate to say I am a Shore Witch. But the difference is only one of perception. In practice there is no difference in the workings of magic whether a witch is of land, shore or sea.”

“I don’t believe in magic,” Castiel retorted.

“Then why the hell did you come to consult a witch?” the human snarled, throwing his arms above his head in a gesture of frustration.

“Because I have a question of science,” Castiel stressed firmly.

“Oh,” the man said, his eyes narrowing with thought. “Now I know who you are. Thought you looked familiar. Prince Castiel of Atlan. The irritating one. Rowena once told me all about you.”

“Rowena called me ‘irritating’?” Castiel asked, feeling wounded.

The shore witch snickered. “Nah, she said you were ‘bright, inquisitive and relentless in your pursuit of knowledge’,” he quoted. “Which definitely translates to ‘irritating as hell’ in my opinion.”

“I see,” Castiel said slowly. “Does that mean you are not prepared to enter into discourse with me?”

“Depends,” the witch shrugged. “What will you offer me in trade?”

Castiel startled. It had never even occurred to him the witch’s advice might come at a cost. “I have nothing to offer,” he admitted. “Though I could perhaps offer to go hunt for you. There are abundant shoals in this region. I can faithfully promise a bounteous feast if you so desire.”

The Shore Witch pulled a disgusted face. “Not really into eating fish,” he said. “That’s a pretty trinket on your wrist though. Perhaps that might be adequate payment.” He reached out over the water, towards Castiel’s left arm, his hand making grabby motions.

Castiel scooted backwards again, his neck gills flaring with alarm. “That’s personal. Precious. Priceless.”

“It’s a string of common shells,” the witch mocked. “Pretty, admittedly, but hardly ‘priceless’.”

“It’s priceless to me,” he insisted.

The witch’s mouth quirked with sly amusement. “So what about the gemstone at your throat? Is that also precious and priceless?”

“You must know exactly what it is,” he spat. “It’s a curse.”

“Oooh,” the witch said, his formerly indifferent expression transforming to genuine interest. “Do tell. First time I’ve ever heard someone with a Destiny Stone refer to it as a ‘curse’. Settle down and tell Uncle Crowley all about it.”

“You have not named your price,” he reminded the shore witch stiffly.

“Oh, pish, posh,” Crowley said, gesturing airily with one hand. “Let’s call this one a freebie.”

He listened as Castiel told him all about the stone, about Dean, about his journey, about his realization that he no longer cared about following his destiny or finding his true mate. He just wanted to mute the gem and swim home.

Home to Dean.

“He might not be my ‘True mate’,” he ended, with solemn dignity. “But he is the other half of my soul. He is the one that I want.”

“So why don’t you just take the Destiny Stone off and simply throw it away?” Crowley challenged, his mouth twisted into a sneer.

“You know why,” he growled. “It won’t come off. Don’t you think I’ve tried?”

“Ooooh,” Crowley said. “That’s interesting.”

“What is?”

The Shore Witch shrugged. “Lots of people say they know what they want. But they don’t ever actually pick up the nerve to do it. They moan and groan about the unfairness of fate but never actually get off their asses to really try to defy it. Interesting to know you actually did try to remove the stone. That changes things.”

“I did try. But I can’t break the necklace. I can’t cut it. It’s impossible to remove. And if I try to swim away from the direction it insists that I go, it gets louder and louder in my head until I can’t even think for the noise. It drowns out everything else and, without sonar, I can’t find my way home anyway. That’s why I came to you, because I don’t believe in magic. There has to be a logical, scientific explanation as to why it won’t come off. Once I understand that, I will be able to remove it and go home.”

“This was your mother’s stone originally, yes? So your mother must have removed it,” Crowley pointed out.

“Only after she found her truemate.”

“But why?”

“Because it had done its job, obviously.”

“Think about it less obviously. How did your mother take it off?”

Castiel frowned with frustration. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Think about it. Who took your mother’s necklace off?”

“Well, my father. It’s the ceremony. The seeker finds their truemate. The truemate unfastens the necklace which proves they are…oh …that’s not possible…no…it can’t be true. I must be confused. I was just a pup…I’m remembering it wrong. I must be.”

“Or maybe you remember it exactly the way it happened,” Crowley suggested, eyes twinkling as though he, somehow, knew the precise memory that had startled Castiel.

“But it makes no sense. Gabriel and Kali are perfect together. Sure, they’re both on the wrong side of insane and both as likely to stab each other as kiss each other but, trust me, they are absolutely made for each other.”

“Lots of passion, right?” Crowley said slyly.

“But Michael… no, Michael loves Hannah and they’re perfect for each other too. Michael is so staid and boring that anyone other than Hannah would probably have smothered him in his sleep years ago. There is definitely no way he was ever Kali’s Destiny.”

“And yet he was the one able to remove her stone,” Crowley pointed out.

“But she mated Gabriel,” Castiel protested.

“So it all worked out for the best, didn’t it?”

“So Kali’s Destiny stone was wrong?” Castiel asked, bewildered, hopeful.

Crowley shrugged lightly. “Was it? I mean, yeah, Kali obviously went to Atlan in search of Michael and arrived several years too late if Michael was ever supposed to be her Truemate. But if she hadn’t gone looking for Michael, she wouldn’t have found Gabriel. So it all worked out as it was supposed to, didn’t it?”

“But how? Why?”

“I guess the easy scientific answer is that if the stones match genetically, as witches such as your mentor Rowena believe, then maybe anyone with the right genetics would do and so perhaps any sibling of Michael would have been a suitable match as a ‘truemate’. So maybe Kali, stuck with a impossible situation, just chose the available option with the most suitable personality and called him her truemate.”

“You’re saying that someone’s Destiny isn’t preordained?”

“Nope,” Crowley said, popping the ‘p’ dramatically. “I’m saying that science won’t offer the answer you’re looking for because you’re looking at this whole thing wrong anyway. That’s the problem with you Northern fish people. You all take things far too literally despite having hidden yourself away at the bottom of the ocean so long that you’ve all forgotten what things even mean. You’re all tied up in tradition and following what you think you ‘know’ that it never occurs to you that what you believe is wrong, wrong, wrong. Do you even know what Destiny means?”

“Your True Mate,” Castiel replied confidently.

“Aaaannnd, there’s the problem,” Crowley said. “Right there.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Clearly,” Crowley said, with an eye roll. “Destiny means an inescapable course of events in your life. Predestined fate. The word originates from a ‘land monster’ language ‘Latin’; the word ‘destinare’. Which is also the root of the word ‘destination’. And what is a destination? A predetermined end of a journey. Because that is what a Destiny Stone shows you, Prince Castiel. Some predetermined waypoints on the journey of your life. The experiences that will write the song of your heart. Realistically, it has nothing to do with True Mates at all.”

“But everyone who follows a Destiny Stone meets their True Mate,” Castiel argued.

“I’ll give you that 99 out of a hundred people do,” Crowley agreed. “Might be co-incidence. Might be fate. But I put it to you that meeting your True Mate is not the destination. It’s the prize. The reward, if you will. Succeed in following the path of the Destiny Stone and, basically, that’s how you earn your True Mate. You follow your destiny to learn the song of your heart and, if you’re really lucky, along the way you’ll find the one person who can sing it for you.”

“So you’re saying that Kali earned her True Mate by fulfilling her destiny and meeting Michael in Atlan, but that Gabriel always was her intended True Mate.”

Crowley clapped sardonically. “There you go,” he said. “Makes a lot more sense than the idea that prissy git King Michael might ever have removed the stick up his ass long enough to be compatible with a hellcat like Kali.”

Castiel had no idea what either a git or a hellcat were, but he still caught the gist of the comment and winced with reluctant agreement.

“So let’s consider Dean. You kissed him and it was all rainbows and puppies and candy cane?”

Castiel blinked with total incomprehension.

“Fish,” Crowley muttered rudely. “Look, you kissed him and you wanted to climb him like a tree, right?”

“What’s a…”

“You wanted to jump his bones and make baby fish, right?”

“We are both male,” Castiel clarified, in case he hadn’t made that clear earlier. “However, if you are asking whether I kissed him and knew that he was my intended mate, then you are completely correct. Though, honestly, I knew that from the day I met him. I allowed myself to be drawn into doubt whether he was my true mate by the insistence of the Destiny Stone that I should leave him, but I never truly doubted that he was the mate of my heart.”

“TMI,” Crowley groaned. “Spare me the feels, okay? Just tell me, why do you think the stone led you away from Dean? Did you really think there was someone better than him?”

“No one could ever be better than him. I was like a land monster. Greedy. Avaricious,” Castiel admitted bitterly. “I had everything I needed in my arms but I still wanted more.”

Crowley looked at him thoughtfully. “Maybe,” he agreed. “Or could be the stones are as much about the journey as they are about the destination. Maybe you were right all along and Dean was your truemate but you weren’t yet his. You have to ask yourself, who is the singer and who is the song?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Think about it. What if Dean had never come to Atlan? What if you met him, say, today for the first time? Are you the same person today as you were on your twenty first birthday? Are you still the same Mer as you were when you left Atlan?”

Castiel thought about that and shook his head. “I have changed greatly since this journey began,” he admitted. “I have learned much that is new and have reflected greatly upon my past. I am much changed but I believe those changes have been positive ones. Yet , if anything, with every step I have taken towards greater self-enlightenment my love and desire for Dean has strengthened. I may previously have not seen myself clearly, but I have always seen Dean clearly.”

“So perhaps today the stone would say yes. But on that day you hadn’t yet followed your Destiny. I don’t think these things work in isolation anyway, Castiel. I think both parties have a say. You tell me you wanted Dean. You tell me you still want Dean. But what did Dean want?”

Castiel shook his head mulishly. “Dean loved me. He wanted nothing more than for the stone to lead me to him. In that moment we kissed there was no doubt in my mind that we both wanted it to be true.”

“This is the same Dean who spent three years actively preparing you for your journey? The same Dean who urged you to go find your real truemate? Seems to me that whether he wanted it or not, he didn’t ever believe it might be true. So you were not his truemate on that day.”

“That failing was mine. He never believed I really loved him. He thought I was just a naïve lonely pup who had never even experienced friendship with anyone else, let alone had a choice over who I could fall in love with. He thought I only loved him because I had no one to compare him with. But his love for me was real. Rowena once told me ‘sometimes real love is knowing the difference between when you should cling tight and when you should let someone go’. And I thought she was talking about me. About a choice I would have to make. But I understand now. She was talking about Dean. That I would know his love was real, because he would ‘let me go’.”

And that was the nub of it, he realized. When he had left Dean he had been heartbroken, yes, but his sorrow had always been selfish, hadn’t it? His broken dreams. His heartache. His loss. Not once, in all these months had he really, truly, thought about Dean’s heartache.

“I am a terrible person,’ he wailed. “No wonder I wasn’t worthy of being Dean’s truemate.”

“Well, perhaps you weren’t then, though I think you’re missing a far bigger piece of the puzzle here with this self-flagellation. And, as amusing it is to listen to, I have better things to do today,” Crowley grumbled. “Anyway, the point is, faced with the same scenario, would you leave him today?”

“NO.”

“Then perhaps this particular self-realization is the ‘destination’ your Destiny Stone wished to lead you to,” Crowley suggested. “Though, like I said, I think fate is concerned with something a little more complicated than simply your own emotional immaturity before you left Atlan. If magic worked actively simply to eradicate stupidity, the world would be inhabited by far fewer idiots. Tell me, what is your stone saying to you now?”

“Nothing,” Castiel confessed, a little confused. “It has been muted since I entered this place.”

Crowley rolled his eyes. “Damnit. Forgot about my own dampeners.” He waved his hands dramatically, then said. “Try now.”

The Destiny stone immediately flared to life.

GO, the stone said.

South, the stone said.

Swim south, the stone said.

Go now, the stone said.

South  
Now.  
GO.  
GO.  
GO.

“It’s changed direction again,” Castiel said, throwing his hands in the air in frustration. “Now it’s telling me to go southwards. But that can’t be right. I need to turn WEST to return to Atlan.”

“Aha,” Crowley said, with a satisfied smirk. “Now that makes a lot more sense.”

“What does?”

“That your journey will end at the equatorial waters where Dean originated.”

“That’s why it’s still insisting I go South? But Dean isn’t there.”

“Isn’t he? You’ve been gone months, Castiel. What on Earth makes you think that Dean remained in Atlan?” Crowley countered. “Sure, I imagine he hung around for a while, hoping and praying you might return. But I imagine after a month or two, he had to face the reality that you had left forever and I imagine the idea of remaining in Atlan became unbearable for him. Everything there a memory of what he had lost. So I wouldn’t be surprised if he just upped and left. If so, where would he most logically go?”

“To the Wildlings,” Castiel agreed sadly. And it hurt so much to picture Dean making that lonely journey, one surely even more fraught with danger than his own since Dean would have headed directly into the wilds of the deep ocean.

“And if so, this whole fiasco makes a lot more sense,” Crowley announced.

“How does any of this possibly make sense,” Castiel spat.

“Look at the situation logically. You were the one with the Destiny stone, not Dean. That means you were always the one supposed to join Dean. Your future was never meant to be in Atlan. Think about it, fishboy, your mother’s Destiny led her to Atlan. Kali’s Destiny led her to Atlan. Your Destiny was supposed to lead you away from Atlan. That’s how Destiny stones work. And on the surface of it, I would say what really buggered this whole thing up was Dean’s mother. She wasn’t supposed to return to Atlan. Ever. If she hadn’t returned, Dean would have stayed where you were supposed to go. So maybe the real reason the stone led you away from Dean was so that he would go to that place and the stone has just been leading you around by the nose, planting a number of red herrings like me, just wasting time until Dean was where you were always supposed to meet him.

“But my opinion is that since I doubt you would have survived five minutes out on your own without Dean’s training, and the experience you’ve gained from the last few months means you’re now far more likely to survive crossing the great ocean yourself, my gut feeling is that maybe all of this was destiny.”

“So if I follow the stone southwards it will lead me to Dean?” Castiel asked, his heart filling with renewed hope.

“I believe so,” Crowley agreed. “Unless your Destiny is to be eaten by tiger sharks en route to locating Dean. These things aren’t set in stone. Having a predestined fate isn’t a guarantee of a happy ending. But in the remote chance you are supposed to do the whole lovers-reunited bollocks, I suggest you get a move on. The wildlings are nomads, Prince Castiel. They constantly circumnavigate the equator. Unless you want to spend the next ten-years or so playing catch-up, arriving in a place only after they have already left, I suggest you get your pretty little tail into gear and get moving.”


	4. The Singer And The Song: Part Three

_**“The journey is always towards the other soul.” – D.H. Lawrence** _

Three weeks after leaving the King Witch’s lair, Castiel finally reached the Ocean and entered the waters of the true deep for the first time.

Unlike the point at which the channel had met the Ocean earlier in his journey, the demarcation between sea and ocean directly south of Miramen was not immediate and obvious. The shallower, gentler seas he’d been swimming through had become too wide at this point for the land masses on either side to still be visible even on the clearest of days, so Castiel had been incrementally acclimatized to the effects of the vast undersea currents that swept for thousands of miles from one continent to another. By the time he had transitioned from Sea into true Ocean, where the waters were often wild and unpredictable, he had already become somewhat used to adjusting his forward motion to compensate for the effects of the crisscrossing currents that frequently buffeted him sideward.

Shortly after entering the deeper water, Castiel spotted a small Hu sailing ship that was tacking in a southerly direction. He found that trailing in its wake during daylight hours was considerably easier than swimming alone, because letting the ship pilot his direction for him meant he was free to simply mindlessly follow the ship’s passage during the daytime. It allowed him to detach his concentration from the route itself and instead utilize most of his attention on the strange and fascinating life that teemed in the Ocean around him.

Previously, he’d always been too occupied by his end destination to consider his surroundings as he journeyed, but using the tiny sailboat as a pacesetter freed the majority of his attention to enjoy the myriad of unfamiliar beings that dwelled in the deep such as manta rays and eels. It also, obviously more importantly, allowed him to pay particular attention to the sharks that constantly moved within these more open waters. He wasn’t truly concerned about a single lone shark or two crossing his path. He was far too large and potentially dangerous a prey to tempt most predators unless they were moving in a pack.

He knew, however, that what could appear on the surface to be only some individual sharks scattered around his location at random could actually be a hunting pack deliberately scattering widespread in the hope of catching him unaware when they finally tightened and closed the circle around him. So he kept his attention tuned on the patterns of movements in the surrounding water, tracking the routes taken by each creature of concern, remaining conscious of the movements of each individual shark so that he never found himself suddenly and unexpectedly surrounded. Sharks were notorious for playing a patient long game unless driven to sudden frenzy by the taste of blood in the water, so Castiel was not taking their current apparent disinterest in him at face value.

But, to be perfectly honest, the real reason he followed the vessel was that it was crewed only by what he assumed was a family group; two adult humans and two human pups, none of whom ever appeared on deck at night. He assumed that meant they had some form of spell that allowed the ship to sail itself whilst they slept. The situation was ideal for him, however, because it absolutely guaranteed it was safe for him to approach the vessel whenever the night fell. At the rear of the ship was a coiled chain and anchor, much smaller yet similar to the illustrations he’d seen in Rowena’s books. He understood the function of an anchor so assumed it was presumably for use only in port since it served no purpose in the deep ocean. Which meant the Hu would have no reason to utilize it at all until they returned to shallow water.

After some cautious investigation, Castiel devised a way of curling his body between the anchor and the hull, in a way that his body was held securely against the ship as it travelled. It wasn’t a perfect place for him to sleep but he decided it was still considerably safer than any other alternative he might find in the open ocean. Plus, it had the added bonus of allowing him to get some rest and yet simultaneously still continue moving south, thereby almost halving his journey time.

Now that Crowley had convinced him that the Destiny Stone was leading him back to Dean, Castiel was willing to take almost any risk to speed his journey to its completion.

Using the tiny ship to aid his travel would still have made sense to him even if he hadn’t been in a frantic hurry. However, it would have proved nothing more than a crafty way to hitch a lift were it not for his own curiosity.

Because, on the rare occasions that both the wind and the sea settled into almost total stillness, rather than use the same ‘spell’ that kept the ship moving steadily through the night, the humans took the opportunity of being occasionally becalmed to take a rest from their journey and they then occupied themselves with tasks such as fishing.

Castiel would swim away from the vessel to a safe distance and then bob in the waves, watching their activities with great interest. He told himself it was simply good sense to attempt to understand the ‘enemy’ better, but the truth was that he was bored and lonely and, despite his urge to keep moving, common sense told him it would be faster in the long run to always wait for the ship to move on. It would soon overtake him, anyway, as soon as it set sail again, so it was pointless to waste energy by setting off ahead of it. Energy equated to food and whilst fish were bountiful in the Ocean, the waters moved swiftly so the fish had to be pursued to be caught, which also used energy.

Balancing the energy expenditure of catching fish with the energy gained by doing so was often a delicate balance in the Ocean. He missed the calmer waters of the seas near land, where the shoals were lazy and food could often simply be effortlessly plucked out of the water as he swam.

The ship’s inhabitants fascinated him though. At first he thought the Land Monsters inhabiting the sailing ship were of a totally different species than the Witch King, Crowley. Although their heads and limbs were similar in appearance, their bodies were fat and round and bright orange in color, so they looked peculiarly like upright, four-limbed crabs. Awkward and ungainly creatures that staggered gracelessly around on the deck of their ship . It was only when, one day, he spotted the adult male Hu without his orange shell that Castiel realized that was what the peculiar body shapes were; Shells. These land monsters simply wore fat orange shells that they could shuck off at will, similarly to the way hermit crabs could vacate their body armor too.

Whenever any of the humans approached his side of the ship, he would duck under the waves until he was out of their sight. But twice, distracted by something else in his immediate surroundings, he failed to move fast enough. The first time it was the adult male who unexpectedly peered in his direction. The human not only saw him but seemed to actually meet his gaze full on before Castiel, frozen in horror for a split second, thought to flip his tail and dive. Heart in his mouth, he swam underwater until he was right next to the hull, then he cautiously rose, sure he was too close to the ship now to be seen from above, his tattoo already itching under his skin in rebuke of his carelessness. But then he heard the human talking. Heard him telling the others that he had seen a dolphin, and he breathed a deep sigh of relief that his ‘glamor’, or the Hu’s willful blindness perhaps, had worked its peculiar magic.

The second time was less because he was distracted and more that he’d become too complacent after that first incident about the protection afforded by his ‘glamor’. He’d forgotten the caveats Rowena had mentioned until it was too late. This time it was one of the pups who saw him. A small one with golden hair that billowed in the breeze as she excitedly told her family that she had just seen a ‘mermaid’.

Castiel was too busy panicking to take offense at being called a female.

But again he heard the adult male tell the pup that what she was looking at was most definitely a dolphin, something repeated immediately by the adult female, so he decided it didn’t matter that the pup had seen him because, clearly, no-one believed her anyway.

So the third time one of the Hu saw him, it wasn’t even an accident.

He had become so intrigued by the phenomenon of his own ‘glamor’ that he deliberately revealed himself to the boy-pup by way of an experiment.

Despite the pup being barely a few inches taller than the tiny blonde pup, so presumably only fractionally older, the boy-pup, like his parents, looked at Castiel and saw only a dolphin.

Castiel didn’t know whether that caused him relief or sorrow. Was it evidence that only the very tiniest of Hu pups remained capable of seeing the world truly? Did all Hu experience such a brief period of being able to perceive the world clearly before their perception somehow became warped until only mundanity remained within their spectrum of vision? Or was there some specific difference between the girl pup and the rest of her family? He had insufficient data to reach a conclusion but still felt some element of sadness to know that Pontus had not been satisfied to only curse the Hu with the loss of their tails but had seemingly left them partially blinded too.

Perhaps, he pondered, that was the true reason the Hu were so prone to acts of careless brutality against the denizens of the sea. Perhaps, rather than being ‘monsters’ by choice, they were lashing out blindly at a world they only half-saw and half-remembered. Perhaps they were merely hurt and lost and afraid. Perhaps even, he imagined fancifully, the sea still sang to their hearts and that was why they were drawn to travel over it in their ships in a vain attempt to recapture the existence from which they had been banished.

After that, he lost his fear of the humans completely, using their occasional stops to bask in the waves and hunt for food. And if, now and then, he saw the girl pup peeking at him from the deck of the ship, he didn’t worry. One day he even cautiously waved back when she waved at him. It was harmless, he decided. She would grow up and either forget this encounter or convince herself it was a childish fantasy or would be painted insane by other adults if she continued to insist that what she had seen was real.

All of which was true, so the whole series of encounters would have faded from his own memory soon enough too, had it not been for the behemoth.

The behemoth came one night, when the Sea was calm but the wind was high so the ship was moving at a steady pace through the water, spell-steered, whilst the humans presumably slept.

It was the noise that woke Castiel from his own slumber, a low toned, throbbing, rumbling growl that crashed over him like waves, the sound of something moving under the water, something so vast if was as though an actual mountain had torn loose from the seabed and was now rushing towards the tiny ship.

Castiel detached from the hull and moved away and to the side of the ship, sending out his own web of high pitched song, waiting for the echolocation to tell him the exact size and nature of the threat that approached. He imagined it could only be a whale, since he couldn’t conceive of any larger Ocean leviathan and, since most whales were placid and thoughtful in nature, he was initially more confused than alarmed. Even should a whale be as colossal as the oncoming sound tsunami of its approach suggested, he couldn’t imagine any situation in which a whale would attack without provocation.

But when his song bounced back to him, his blood chilled. Because whatever manner of creature approached, it was of an impossible size. His original idea of a moving mountain suddenly became less of a metaphor and more a truth of nightmare proportions. The leviathan was surely large enough to swallow the entirety of Atlan several times over.

No beast could be so colossally huge. Not even the legends of kraken and other sea monsters allowed for such an impossibility.

And then, as the sound became ever louder, and the behemoth grew closer, Castiel finally saw the monster that was approaching and, even then, doubted the evidence of his own eyes. That somehow he was still half-asleep and so the darkness of the night was somehow twisting reality into bizarre fantasy.

Because the behemoth wasn’t a whale.

It wasn’t a creature at all.

It was a ship.

A ship the size of a mountain.

It towered out of the water hundreds of tail-lengths high, and its hull descended into the water almost as much again. The ship was so huge it was capable of containing thousands of Land Monsters within its depths. And Castiel realized the sound he was hearing, the thrumming, thunderous pulses of sound were not the beating of a behemoth’s heart but the swirling of huge knifing blades under the water at the rear of the ship, that were somehow propelling the vessel forwards.

It was approaching so rapidly that Castiel wasn’t sure that even if he dived immediately, and shot downwards into the depths below for safety, he could escape the suction caused by those vast revolving blades.

But even as he considered that, he realized the tiny ship he had been traveling with was in the direct path of the oncoming monster and perhaps it was simply too dark or perhaps the spell that guided the diminutive sailing ship had erred somehow, allowing it to cross the path of the huge one, but the behemoth was going to hit the tiny ship and its unsuspecting occupants. The little family of Hu were going to be crushed beneath the approaching ship.

One day in the future it would be the rotting hull of their ship into which a young merpup might venture in search of ghosts.

He told himself they were Land Monsters. He told himself this was not his business. He told himself that every moment he dithered was one moment less to save himself. He even reminded himself that Land Monsters lacked the magic that allowed Mer to hear and understand the languages of almost all sentient species. That Mer lacked the magic to speak more than a few of those languages themselves. So even if he wanted to warn them of the approaching leviathan, they wouldn’t understand what he was telling them.

But stuck in his mind was the image of that tiny blonde pup and her cautious friendly wave towards him, of the fact she could see him, that she chose to believe in him even in the face of adult mockery. That she, at least for this brief period of time, was not tainted by Pontus’ curse upon the Hu.

So, although he knew it to be illogical, Castiel felt there was a bond between himself and the pup. A kinship. A fledgling covenant. An obligation to at least try to save her from a watery death.

So he sped to the sailing ship and he sang. A song of sharp trills and high pitched chattering. He yelled at the occupants in the tongue of the dolphins, praying that even if they failed to understand that tongue they might at least be familiar enough with it to understand the tones of danger and alarm in his voice.

He sang even as the approaching behemoth, its belly cutting so low in the water that it was like an inverted volcano, continued to bear down on them. He sang until he saw lights come on inside the ship, until he heard voices rising with panic. And then he dropped and dove.

Deeper and deeper he soared downwards, cutting through the water like an arrow, until the pressure against his eardrums felt like a vice grabbing his head and squeezing, as hundreds of tail-lengths of water pressure crushed against his flesh like a pressing weight determined to simply squash him as flat as a Ray.

And still, he felt the behemoth attempting to swoop him up in its wake, drag him into its swirling blades to be sliced apart. And the metal beast belched clouds of foul excrement from its blades so that the water turned metallic and oily and dark, coating his mouth and gills with a substance far less palatable than even squid ink. So he swam on and downwards, panicked, desperate, his terror even greater than the pain of the overwhelming pressure until, finally, the drag on his flesh lessened and his abused ears finally told him the monstrous ship had passed harmlessly over and beyond him to continue scything its way through the ocean towards the West.

He rose far more slowly than he had descended, allowing his body to reacclimatize to the reducing pressure as he returned to the surface. His heart was still thumping wildly in his chest, not only from the danger so narrowly avoided but from the genuine and extreme shock he felt that the Land Monsters could have created such a thing as a moving sea mountain. Suddenly the idea that the witch king was a human was far less of an anomaly to him because surely nothing less than the most arcane sorcery could produce such a mechanical behemoth.

For Castiel, who had always eschewed the idea of magic, the thought was shocking. Yet he couldn’t even begin to imagine what science could allow a vessel as large as a dozen cities to actually float upon the water instead of sinking like a stone.

And with that thought, he remembered the tiny sailing ship that had been in the monster’s path and wondered whether it was even worth checking its fate when it seemed impossible that it might have escaped in time.

Still, he reminded himself, the little ship did have magic of its own. Its own tiny blades sitting below its stern that the humans had once activated with a spell when when the ship had been becalmed for two whole days in a row. He remembered hearing the female Hu accusing her mate of “cheating” and had been confused at the time, uncertain why use of some magic, such as the night steering, was acceptable magic and yet using the propelling blades was not.

Now, though, having experienced the behemoth, having tasted the foulness of its excretions, Castiel understood that the magic that powered the blades of any Land Monster vessel was surely of a dark and evil nature. It may, however, have been a dark magic that might have somehow managed to save the tiny ship also and so, as always, Castiel’s need for knowledge outweighed his fear of the unknown.

It took him a while to locate the sailing ship in the dark waters. The passing of the behemoth had churned the ocean in its wake, causing huge waves to part the seas behind it. And when he did first spot the ship in the distance, he nearly turned tail and left without bothering to investigate further, since he could see the thing was badly wounded, listing in the water like a dying fish. The surface of the sea was strewn with floating debris and amongst this detritus Castiel identified the mast of the ship’s main sail. Whether the ship sank or not, its journey southwards was clearly over. So Castiel had no reason to consider its fate further. Their journey together was done, regardless of whether the Land Monsters aboard it had survived.

And yet he couldn’t bring himself to simply swim away.

The not-knowing would haunt him. Somewhere along his journey he had evolved past the idea that being of a different species automatically made someone alien and other. From Meg, to the red snapper, to the whales and the dolphins and Crowley himself, Castiel had begun to embrace the idea that all living creatures shared some portion of similar values and experiences and that all lives had equal worth to his own. That Atlan’s historical preference of promoting exclusion and isolation from most other species was as limiting as it was protective.

As he neared the vessel he realized, with some relief, that its hull was still intact. Despite the odd angle at which it was slumped in the water, it was not in danger of actually sinking unless the waves on the surface were stirred into violence by a storm. Since the weather was calm and the sky was cloudless above, with the moon and stars clearly visible, the occupants had hours, if not days, for another Land monster vessel to come to their aid. And he could hear voices shouting from the deck, proving the humans had survived.

Curiously though, he cautiously moved forwards because he could distinguish only three voices, all yelling, over and over, the same unfamiliar word.

“Claire…Claire…Claire…Claire…Claire…”

And that was when he realized the tiny girl pup was not on the deck of the ship. Only three humans remained of the original four and, from their behavior and their cries, it was obvious that the pup had, somehow, fallen from the vessel and been lost to the sea.

It wasn’t his business, he reminded himself.

A baby monster was still a monster.

A monster that had peeked at him shyly and waved at him with an enchanted smile.

A monster he had waved back to.

“She’s dead now,” the cold voice of pragmatic Michael spoke in his head. “So now her silence is assured. Consider this fate smiling upon you, Castiel. The pup has taken the secret of our existence to her watery grave.”

But Castiel ignored the voice. His eyes, far sharper than those of a human, could see even in the darkness, far away on the northern horizon, something anomalous bobbing on the waves. Something monochrome in the darkness and yet something his heart insisted might be orange. Something that hadn’t sunk at all, but was, somehow, remaining buoyant on the water.

Perhaps the orange shells were somehow spelled with the same magic that allowed the behemoth to float, he considered. But sinking under the water to drown was not the only danger to the lost pup. Far greater was the probability of the cold itself leeching the life from her body. The ocean was chill enough that even Castiel felt uncomfortable at times. Which meant it was surely far too cold for a frail human to survive in for long. It had already been some time since the behemoth had fractured the tiny ship and it would take some time to reach the destination to which the tide had already swept her even if Castiel was not still recovering from his battle with the Kraken.

The sun was just beginning to break over the horizon as he swam towards the shape in the water. Still weak and pale so early in the morning, its light barely pierced the gloom and yet, although true dawn was still perhaps an hour away, the black of night lifted enough for color to start seeping back into the world and his keen eyes saw that the object ahead of him was indeed the orange of a land monster shell.

He knew it was already too late the moment he arrived at the pup’s side. Her hair, previously golden and waving in the air like a cloud, was hanging in dark sodden trails around her face, as though the sea had already claimed her for its own and had wrapped dark kelp around her features like a bridal veil. Her eyes were closed, her skin was as pale as the moon and her lips were almost as blue as his own tail. Her skin no longer rose and fell with each breath because it was clear she was not breathing at all. Perhaps had not been breathing for some time.

Yet Castiel had a half-remembered idea that a drowned human could sometimes be brought back to life. And somehow that it was even more likely if intense cold had slowed their heartbeat into near hibernation. It was, he knew, most probably no more than a childish fairytale which, even if true, involved spells that only a sea witch would know. He, himself, knew little more than the one completely necessary spell Rowena had taught him after the first occasion he ‘borrowed’ one of the books out of her sanctum with disastrous results. A simple spell. One even a five-year-old Mer pup could learn. A spell that enabled him to create a tiny pocket of air within which he could move, and read, books and maps in his more usual underwater environment without them simply turning to sodden mush in his hands.

A spell that not only created an air pocket, he realized, as he thought about the way it had magically always warmed and dried his hands whenever they entered the bubble to turn a page. Air. Heat. Dehumidification. Which, even as he thought about it, suddenly struck him as exactly the right kind of spell to revive a drowned human.

And so he wondered whether the tales he had read in Rowena’s reclaimed books written by long dead sailors, those stories of mermaids and sirens and selkies interacting with and even oftentimes saving the land monsters from the dangers of the sea, were not merely the fantasies of drink-addled Hu sailors but were based on far more fundamental truths. Was the fiction that a land monster might gain the ability to breathe water if held in a Mer’s embrace actually based on memories of true encounters with those few of his people who knew the spell to create an air bubble? Were these then not even fantasies at all but really historical accounts of real happenings that had been written as fiction merely to obfuscate knowledge of the true existence of his kind?

Or were all those thoughts merely excuses? Self-justifications for his decision to grasp hold of the human pup, careful to keep his claws safely sheathed as he handled her fragile body within its strange orange shell, as his lips moved to utter the incantation for dry, for air, for warm, for breath, for… for life?

The bubble formed. Not visible. It was never visible even in water. It was just a displacement. A substitution of water for air. Nothing more than a parlor trick taught by an indulgent sea witch to a tiny pup with a terrible habit of stealing books… a pup who had grown, apparently, into a Mer with a terrible habit of befriending the pups of monsters.

And the spell did even more than Castiel had hoped.

Almost instantly he saw the magic working. Saw the pup’s blue lips return to pinkish red, and her darkened hair lighten back to the color of spun sunlight. Even the water that had settled inside her lungs was swept away, replaced by oxygen that whooshed into the vacated place with enough shocking force to, apparently, restart her tiny heart all by itself. The whole process was almost instantaneous. No dramatic spluttering or choking or coughing. Nothing more than color gently returning to a monochrome body and then two blue eyes fluttering open from beneath dry, golden lashes. A baby monster returning to life even as the sun rose on the horizon and brought a new day to life with its own form of casual magic.

Castiel could almost hear Rowena chuckling in the distance, could imagine her mocking words of “Go on, dearie, give me a scientific explanation for that magic trick.”

But, for the first time in his life, Castiel didn’t care how it had been done.

It didn’t matter did it? That was the realization he came to as he carefully cradled the pup to his side as he swam back to the wounded sailing ship. It didn’t matter why the pup was alive once more or how she could remain dry and breathing even as he dove and took her below the water to avoid the swells of the waves and the detritus of the shipwreck that littered the surface of the water. The why’s and how’s, always so important to him before, now lapsed into a newfound acceptance that some things simply were. And in questioning such things, in always demanding scientific answers to explain the inexplicable, he somehow cheapened the miracles.

Just as questioning the Destiny Stone’s motives for forcing him to partake of this journey to earn Dean suddenly felt like a rejection of the miracle of having a truemate at all.

For the first time, Castiel had a true sense of a far greater power than himself having a hand in everything. Whether that power was Pontus or Gaia or Fate or some other denizen entirely. Fate, for lack of a better name, was not about the experiences of a single individual or even of a couple. It dealt with a vast tapestry of interlocking threads of which he and Dean were merely two minor stitches.

Was it possible that every creature, no matter how humble, had a predetermined fate? Had it always somehow been fated that this tiny blonde human pup would always drown in an Ocean, only to be then revived by a Merman? What, then, of her fate if he had failed to follow his own fate? Was there a predestined future set out for this pup, a future that interconnected with thousands of other ‘threads’, all of which would have fallen apart had he not followed his own fate and arrived here in this precise place, at this precise time, with this precise spell within his own arsenal? Had the pup’s survival today been balanced on such a cliff-edge of fragile uncertainty that it had depended on his own choice to ‘steal’ a book sixteen years earlier?

The thought was too big, too huge, for him to conceptualize. The idea that every single choice he made possibly impacted on the fate of another somewhere further down the line felt like an overwhelming burden. Except, realistically, perhaps that was the reality of life anyway, wasn’t it? No one ever lived in complete isolation. All actions, all choices, had to affect other people in some fashion or other. Perhaps all this was simply the idea of taking that idea and allowing it to encapsulate everything.

“Just call it magic, dearie, and let fate take care of itself,” Rowena’s voice suggested and though he knew she wasn’t really speaking, wasn’t really there, he found himself nodding his agreement with her words. He was tired of fighting against the tides. Time to accept that sometimes the most logical path was to let the current of fate carry you in whatever direction it wished you to go.

He bore the pup right back to the sailing ship and left her clinging to the side of the hull, then chattered a loud dolphin song to draw the attention of those on board before flipping his tail, diving under the stricken vessel and emerging on the opposite side where he could safely wait to hear the pup being rescued.

Much of what he then overheard meant so little to him it might as well have been spoken in lobster (the one language, inexplicably, no Mer had ever managed to translate). Words such as ‘Cruise Ship’ and ‘Coast Guard’ and ‘radio’ and ‘gee pee esss’ and ‘Angel’. Only the latter was of particular interest, since he overheard both adult humans saying that, despite ‘Claire’s’ insistence she had been rescued by a merman, only an ‘Angel’ could possibly have returned her to them.

He had no idea what an ‘Angel’ was, but what he did understand of the conversation between the land monsters was that a rescue ship was on its way to retrieve them before night fell once more and, still, no-one would believe the pup’s talk of Mer. And that, really, was a far better outcome than any he might have hoped for.

His Destiny stone, oddly silent during the entire incident, suddenly blazed with noisy life once more;

Go, it said.

South, it said.

Now, it said.

Go.

Go.

And, so, Castiel left the tiny crippled sailing ship behind him and sped off through the Ocean towards his truemate.

**xxxx**

As he travelled southwards, the waters warmed still further and the ocean filled with more, and sometimes vastly larger, creatures. He came across flocks of gigantic Manta rays, often four or five tail-lengths wide and twice as long. They were huge flat graceful beasts that flowed like flat sails under the waves. Despite their immense size, because they were only plankton eaters, the only danger they posed to him was the risk of being side-swiped as they passed by him in the water.

He swam past vast pods of swordfish and tuna and seals and porpoises. The former still causing his mouth to water and his stomach to protest his failure to pursue them.

He encountered large family groups of Dusky Dolphins and schools of huge but unexpectedly friendly whale sharks.

He also came across the occasional, far from friendly, Great White Shark too. Although, fortunately, he rarely came across one when it didn’t already have smaller prey in mind. Since Castiel knew the eyesight of those particular predators was poor, and they hunted primarily through smell or the vibrations of other creatures, whenever he saw the tell-tale sign of one in the distance, and couldn’t spot any obvious prey in its path, he stopped swimming entirely and simply floated on the surface of the water until the danger moved on.

Herds of bottle-nosed dolphins frequently bisected his route; sometimes the groups formed of so many hundreds of the creatures traveling together that he was forced to stop swimming and simply wait for them to pass him by. Never a swift process, since too many of them slowed to chat with him as they passed by, eager for more gossip to share as they migrated eastwards. The dolphins were often a welcome break from the intense loneliness of his journey but he still always found himself grateful for the return of peaceful silence once the chattering masses finally left him. Dolphins were friendly but exhausting, he decided. He much preferred encountering them in far smaller groups when their excited conversations were more manageable.

He came upon a myriad of Whales, from Orcas, to Fin Whales, to Humpbacks and once even a family of Blues. The few of them that spoke to him were cordial but reserved. None had any news from the Northern Waters. One of the Humpbacks did, however, say she had crossed the path of a lone red-tailed Mer far to the west, several weeks previously and, although she had not spoken with him, she confirmed the Merman had been heading southwards and had appeared to be a healthy and strong swimmer.

Castiel couldn’t imagine any other Wildling crossing the Ocean southwards from the North, since the Wildlings were known to naturally only circumnavigate the ocean around the equator. It had to be Dean, he told himself. If Dean had crossed the ocean southwards from the channel, he would have crossed a lot further to the West.

Dean had still been healthy.

Dean had still been strong.

He clung on to those ideas, holding them closely to his heart, tiny snippets of hope to pull out and examine like jewels whenever the nights were cold and lonely and he still felt so far from his destination. So far from Dean.

As well as the larger creatures, the sea was filled with jellyfish and turtles and octopi, not to mention enormous shoals of fish that often crossed his path like vast, silvery waves.

The Ocean teemed with life.

It was, he considered, somewhat ironic that the further he ventured into the Ocean and the more amazingly immense he realized the seas actually were, the more crowded they sometimes appeared to be.

Though that was largely an illusion, he understood.

It was mainly the shallow depth he swam at that sometimes caused the feeling of congestion as he was forced to skirt around the pods of various varieties of sea dwelling creatures.

The ocean descended for many fathoms beneath him so diving lower in the water would have soon dispelled any feeling that the sea was too crowded at times. But even apart from the chill of deeper waters, in addition to the uncomfortable pressure on his ears of descending so far, he disliked the manner of creatures he was far more likely to encounter further below the surface.

Far beneath him, the denizens that swam were strange beasts. Some almost living fossils such as the frilled sharks, with their triangular shaped heads and long grey bodies, creatures that lunged like snakes to swallow their victims whole. And, of course, the deep was where the Giant Squid lurked and Castiel’s previous encounter with the Kraken near Trianolis had convinced him that any member of the greater squid family was best avoided by any creature smaller than a sperm whale.

Surprisingly, as he continued southwards he found himself rarely troubled by the presence of sharks anymore. Except for encountering the odd tiger shark migrating through the same open water but otherwise minding their own business, and the occasional Great White who offered him baleful looks from their flat black eyes but never spoke at all, his route didn’t bring him in contact with any other particularly predatory creatures. At least none large or brave enough to tackle prey the size of a Mer. He remained vigilant, knowing complacency could get him killed, but fate appeared to be favoring him enough that his passage remained largely uneventful after the near-miss by the behemoth vessel and he now had learned to listen for such monstrosities and avoid them altogether.

There were many of the city-sized ships, he discovered, though few were as immense as the first one he had encountered. When he considered the difficulty of turning such a leviathan around, it made sense that they appeared to always travel in straight-lines, crisscrossing the ocean along invisible but clearly set routes. Now he knew the bizarre mechanical beasts existed, it was easy to set his course to avoid them long before they approached near enough to pose a danger. Which made him wonder why the humans on the tiny sailing ship had not also known to be wary of their approach.

He missed the company of the little sailing ship; not only because he now understood its presence had probably been the reason he had encountered so few other creatures previously on his journey. It was obvious, in retrospect, that most creatures had sensed its approach and had moved to avoid it, thus leaving the sea surrounding it largely devoid of life. But he also missed the safe harbor the ship had provided. True sleep was now largely impossible. The closest Castiel could come to sleep was floating on the surface of the waves whenever he reached pockets of relatively deserted water, resting his eyes and his body but keeping his ears fully alert for the sounds of being approached by anything larger than fish.

It was only when he reached the warmer waters that marked the start of the equatorial region that it became possible to begin descending to find submarine shelter once more, when the deepness of the ocean reduced considerably in many places because a vast range of sea mountains rose upwards from the depths as though the seabed itself was straining to break the top of the waves. The summits of these undersea mountains, although still many fathoms beneath the surface of the water, were liberally littered with the corpses of long dead Land Monster ships. Barnacled wrecks that blended into the reefs but offered defensible caves within which he could hide himself overnight.

**xxxx**

Castiel knew, from his many hours of studying Rowena’s books, that seismic shifts under the ocean floor were not impossible anywhere in the world, though some areas were considerably more prone to seismic events than others. Whilst minor quakes occasionally happened almost everywhere, the area where Atlan was located had not experienced earthquakes of any significant magnitude since the passing of the last ice age. Along the equator, however, it was unusual for a single season to pass without some significant plate shift occurring. In other words, Castiel knew it was impossible to spend any length of time traversing that particular longitude without inevitably experiencing an undersea quake.

Those of Rowena’s books that referenced the Wildlings, spoke in great detail about the quakes. They held that the seismic instability of the equatorial region was one of the primary factors that drove the Mer of those waters to maintain a largely nomadic lifestyle.

It was also, he remembered, the primary reason Dean’s mother had apparently chosen to return to Atlan with her mate and pups. Whilst she must surely have been as fierce and brave a warrior as John, despite her Atlan roots, since she had traversed the ocean alone in pursuit of her own truemate and Castiel now had first-hand experience of how perilous an undertaking that must have been for the young Lady Maré, she had decided the odds of both her pups surviving to adulthood as Wildlings had been unacceptably poor, hence her return to the city with her young family.

Castiel regretted he’d been too ignorant to ask the right questions of her when he’d had the opportunity. Lady Maré had spoken openly that there were dangers in living with John’s people but her comments had been light and non-specific. Generalizations suitable for the ears of a pup. Not the specifics that Castiel now needed, although at the time when he had been able to ask for more details it hadn’t occurred to him to do so. He regretted that now. It hadn’t been that he hadn’t been interested. Castiel had always devoured any and all knowledge for its own sake. It had been that he hadn’t had enough context to know what the relevant questions actually should have been.

What he did know though, from Maré’s tales and Rowena’s books, was that despite their name, the Wildlings were supposedly not completely devoid of civilization. They did not live permanently in the wilds of the Ocean, living their lives with the mindless savagery of beasts (as Michael had suggested on more than one occasion). Like the Khalessi, the original Wildling society actually reputedly predated that of the Mer who had originally settled Atlan. They had, in effect, been civilized for longer. It was just that their version of civilization did not mesh with that of the Atlans.

Apparently the entire equatorial zone was littered with Mer habitations, many of them as old as Atlan and many far older. But the Wildlings hadn’t settled in any of them. Instead they constantly navigated between those habitations as they constantly circumnavigated the world. The Wildlings never stayed more than a few weeks at any one location before moving on to the next. What Castiel was still not exactly certain about was why they chose not to settle. Though he knew it was related to the seismic instability of the region, it escaped his understanding completely why they hadn’t simply relocated to an area more suitable for long-term settlement.

Castiel was also reasonably certain, from what he had read and from what little Dean’s mother had explained, that the Wildlings did not migrate en mass. They were not one huge community, like the Mer of Atlan, but they lived, instead, in small independent clans formed of families or friends or even merely hunting parties formed from groups of several unattached single Mer. The Wildlings rarely joined together in larger groupings, doing so only temporarily, for funerals or matings of particularly highly respected members of their clans, and then returning to their smaller groups again.

Their behavior made it both more and less likely that he might encounter any of them by mere chance. He reasoned there would be more opportunities to find them, since dozens of separate Wildling groups were always in constant motion around the entire equator, and yet those groups were so small and the ocean was so vast that the odds of finding any of them simply by chance were infinitely small.

Were it not for his Destiny Stone, Castiel would have given up entirely on the notion of simply swimming aimlessly along the equatorial zone in hope of a chance encounter. He would, instead, have hunted diligently for one of the secret Wildling habitations, then settled there and simply waited for one of the groups to eventually visit it during their migrations. Sooner or later, he was sure, rather than him find the Wildlings, they would have found him. Of course, the odds of that particular group being the one Dean had joined would have been slim to none.

But the Destiny Stone was not driving him to the Wildlings, it was leading him to Dean.

Dean who was, apparently, now traveling west along the equator according to the Destiny Stone.

Go, the stone said.

Go West, the stone said.

Go Now, the stone said.

West  
Now  
Go  
Go  
Go  
GO  
GO.GO.GO.GO.GO.

And Castiel had to hope the fact the stone was so abruptly turning him at a right-angle meant he was not too far from Dean’s location because surely, if Dean had been moving along the equatorial longitude in a westerly direction for some time, the stone would have been directing Castiel in a south-westerly direction for the last few weeks, rather than directly southwards to this almost deserted region of the sea, only to so abruptly change direction again.

Logic said that until very recently Dean had actually been here, in this very place, but had only just left it to return westwards once more.

Though that was a puzzling thought. Why would Dean have travelled directly south, then moved east to here, only to then turn tail and return the way he had come? Had he been alone? Had he met with Wildlings here and then traveled with them back in a westerly direction? Was that why there were no other Mer here? No other anything here? Not even a single, solitary fish as far as Castiel’s eyes could see?

Which made no sense whatsoever.

Even if a group of Wildlings had hunted this area almost ‘bare’ before moving on, still there would be at least some manner of sea life remaining in this place other than barnacles and seaweed. Besides, stripping an area of fish without worrying whether enough breeding stock remained was the way of the Hu, not the Mer. Even in Atlan, where centuries of refusing to send hunting parties to fish far from the City had severely restricted the inhabitants’ diets before the arrival of John, the larders had only ever lacked variety rather than quantity because those species that lived within easy distance had always been farmed with careful respect. So, no, the absence of fish here couldn’t be blamed upon the Wildlings, in his opinion. Even if he was wrong, that didn’t explain why they hadn’t at least left the varieties behind that Mer found unpalatable.

It was that thought, however; the realization that the waters around him were peculiarly devoid of any life, that caused Castiel’s first sense that there was something substantially wrong here.

Something was tickling at his senses, perhaps some natural instinct long buried by his predecessors’ generations of living within the artificial safety of Atlan where acting on ‘instinct’ was something that was frowned upon, an itching at the back of his neck, a knowledge that something was terribly amiss in this place even if he had insufficient experience to understand the actual nature of the wrongness he was feeling. Common sense and logic, however, told him that if all the other denizens of the sea had fled that place, it was highly probable that he should emulate their behavior. And the frantic demands of the stone for him to GO, GO, GO, GO, suddenly struck him as being unlikely to be referring to Dean at all.

The Stone wasn’t yelling at him to follow Dean, the stone was telling him to move his tail and get the heck out of there.

The realization came perhaps a single moment too late.

It would be false to say the next event happened without warning, since it was obvious that every other life form in the area had expected it to happen and had therefore vacated with haste, but for Castiel, who had no experience of the area or of what was or was not a natural level of heat or noise in that region, what happened next was completely unexpected.

The ocean floor erupted.

One moment the sea was unnaturally calm and the next a chasm opened up on the ocean floor and magma spewed out of it in an explosion of flying, burning hot, rocks.

Castiel was already swimming, already cutting through the sea like a knife as he belatedly heeded the warnings of the Destiny stone to flee, but he had set off just fractionally too late to evade the explosion entirely. Several rocks struck him as he swam, striking hard enough to hit him with deep bruising force although not so violently that they pierced his skin. Still, the one rock that punched into his torso just below his ribs, leaving a hand shaped bruise, was savage enough to drive the air back out of his gills and it knocked him sideways and down, into a crevice that ran the length of one of the mountain peaks.

The water inside the crevice was warmer, but calmer, than on the seabed he had fled from, and it was rich with the taste of plankton. Cowering inside the narrow passage, he avoided the worst of the explosive eruptions of rock and silt, and it seemed to him it would be better, safer, to remain in the protection of the narrow gorge than return to the churning water above.

He only realized his mistake when the entire sea mountain began to shudder and shake as plates shifted far below the ocean floor and the rift he was floating within began to close even as a fresh eruption to his right caused the top of the mountain to crumble and slide like an avalanche towards his position.

Castiel frantically looked for a safe escape route but came up blank. If he remained in the crevice he would be crushed between its edges as they closed, but if he emerged he would almost certainly be buried beneath the avalanche of rocks. The only possible chance of survival was a small natural cave eroded into the side of the mountain perhaps three tail lengths to his left. But if he entered it, he would almost certainly then find himself trapped inside after the rock slide had settled.

Still, better to be trapped with a remote possibility of escape than crushed to death where he was, he decided.

So with powerful thrusts of his tail, he powered out of the crevice towards the promised sanctuary of the cave.

And he almost reached it.

But even as his outstretched arms touched the entrance to the small opening in the mountain, the full weight of the falling avalanche began to crash down on top of him.

Even as his body was pummeled by the falling stone, his claws extended into the cave entrance, grasping tight, hauling his body inwards even as his battered tail lost the ability to push him forwards, and his head and shoulders entered the safety of the opening just as a number of rocks fell on his back, pinning him in place. The rocks continued to fall, burying him completely, only failing to crush him with their weight because they fell haphazardly, several rocks large enough to pulverize him landing either side of his tail rather than directly on top of him, and then subsequent rocks formed a pile around and above those larger boulders to form a rough cavern of water around him as they built into the rough approximation of a funeral pyre over his head.

And when the rock fall finally ceased, and the water stopped churning, Castiel had a moment to realize he had somehow survived, though that was little comfort considering he was trapped below a heap of stone that would be impossible to escape from even if he wasn’t pinned to the floor by the rocks lying on his lower back, before, as though it was an afterthought by a capricious fate, a small, fist shaped rock tumbled through the gap between the cave entrance and the settled landslide and struck Castiel’s temple so hard that he lost consciousness entirely.

So he was completely unaware that his Destiny Stone, its glare muted to a pale moonlit glow since the morning after he had left Atlan, flared suddenly to life, blazing around his neck so brightly that it glowed through every tiny gap left between the tumbled, jagged rocks until the whole landslide was radiating a glowing white glow that rose like a beacon, cutting through the sea above until it appeared as though a pure column of light was shining upwards through the water to the very surface of the sea above.


	5. The Singer And The Song: Part Four

_**“The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul” – Victor Hugo** _

Castiel woke into darkness.

His whole body felt as though it was bruised from head to fluke and, just to add to the fun, in addition to the dull, pulsing, bone-deep, full-body ache, he also had intense, stabbing pains in his head and his lower chest, as though sharp, merciless knives were burrowing into his ribs and gnawing into his temple like hungry eels. Yet, worryingly, he was still in far less pain than he had expected to be. Worrying, because his first thought was that the impact of the rocks onto his spine had caused some form of pain-numbing paralysis.

But remembering the way the rocks had pinned him prone to the floor caused a fresh wave of dizzying confusion because, if he was still trapped face-down under the pile of stone, why did it feel as though he was lying supine?

Impossibly, he could feel softness under his head and his shoulder blades as though he were lying on a soft bed of lush seaweed. Lying on his _back_ on a bed of seaweed.

But if he was no longer trapped inside the rockfall, if by some totally inexplicable miracle he had escaped that almost-certain death, then why was it still so dark wherever he now was?

He tried raising his hands to his face but even the mere act of twitching his fingers caused unbearable shooting pains to run up his arms to his shoulders, like blazing trails of lava burning through his veins. He attempted, instead, to simply bend at the waist to sit up, but barely managed to raise his head even an inch or two before the pressure behind his right temple increased until it felt like his entire brain might explode. He groaned in agony and slumped back down again. Then he yelped as the back of his head seemed to impact his seaweed pillow with far more painful force than a drop of a mere couple of inches onto a soft surface warranted.

“Don’t move, ya idjit. Stay absolutely still unless you want to start bleedin’ all over the place again,” a gruff, impatient voice demanded. “Rip them bandages off and those bastards will find us faster than you can even say shark.”

He knew that accent.

Not the voice itself, grumpy and middle-aged, for all it sounded so much like Dean’s father, Lord John, that Castiel wanted to cry with homesickness, but the accent it spoke in. The stranger had the same inflections and phrasing as Dean’s gruff, but kind, father. The accent that Dean still shared, to an extent, despite all his time living in Atlan. Though sometimes Castiel suspected Dean’s own lingering accent was a deliberate affectation, another tool in Dean’s charm armory, because the Wildling habit of slowly drawling occasional words, whilst lazily shortening others, had always sounded stupidly attractive in Dean’s surprisingly husky voice.

“You’re a Wildling?” he queried in wonder, because he couldn’t believe the convoluted route that his Destiny stone had led him upon had still somehow brought him directly to one of Dean’s people. Though, realistically, if he truly had been rescued, who except a Wildling would have been there near the equator to do it?

“I wouldn’t say that out loud around here, pup,” the gruff voice advised. “Folks in the clans don’t take kindly to the term. That’s what folks like you call folks like us. Not what we call ourselves.”

Castiel flushed with embarrassment. He remembered, belatedly, that Dean had told him the word was considered ‘rude’ the very first time they had met. He wondered whether it somehow translated into something highly inappropriate. He seemed to be making a habit of bad first impressions.

“Forgive me,” he said, carefully, the words feeling thick and unwieldy on his tongue. “I am a little light-headed and extremely confused. I am also unfamiliar with your exact language and lexicon. I understand that the Atlan word for your people may be offensive to you, though I truly meant no offense, but I don’t know your own term for yourselves. And I also don’t know why my word for you didn’t just automatically translate into your own word for yourselves.”

“Well my name’s Bobby. But that’s all I’ve got. As for translatin’ itself, don’t see how it could ‘cos we don’t really call ourselves anything,” the Merman admitted. “We’re just people. Or collectively, we’re clans of people. Though I guess it’s okay to call us Hunters if you really need to hang a name on us. But that’s all. Don’t need no cities or fancy names. We’re all just a bunch of people who just happen to swim in the same slipstreams.”

“You’re nomadic, of course,” Castiel agreed, though his thoughts felt fuzzy and the whole conversation had an edge of disassociation as though it was just a dream. Was it a dream? He wondered suddenly, half-convinced he was still trapped under the rocks and this was all just some vivid fever dream. A very dark lucid dream. Why was it so dark in here? And where was here?

But before he could ask, the stranger spoke once more. “What the hell does ‘nomadic’ mean?” he demanded suspiciously.

“Didn’t that translate either? It just means you move with the tides. Never stay in one place for long,” Castiel explained, feeling nauseous but refusing to give in to the sickness before he had a better idea of what had happened and how he’d been rescued at all. If he’d been rescued at all. The dream theory still seemed plausible.

“Got that right,” the stranger said. “Never stay anywhere long. Truth is, we’d already fished this area out for the season and headed off west a couple of days before the quake even happened. It’s a bad time of year to be in a place like this. The land gets restless. Shifts around under the ocean. It’s not only the quakes themselves, though they’re bad enough. When the plates shift, fissures form and the water warms too quick in the cracks . All manner of fish find their way to the disturbance so they can feast on the plankton that grows like weeds in the warmer water. Next thing you know, the sharks arrive to have a party. Gets to be a bit of a feeding frenzy. Best not to be anywhere nearby when that happens. Your damn fool idiocy gettin’ trapped in them rocks ain’t just put you at risk, pup.”

Castiel considered this, though even trying to think felt like he was driving new knives into the back of his head. “You left, but then somehow came back for me?” he queried, struggling to make sense of the Mer’s words.

“Saw the light from that necklace you wore. Most bizarre thing I’d ever seen. Like a star had fallen clear out of the sky and planted itself on the sea bed. A few of us came back to investigate whatever the hell could light up the water enough to be seen for miles. Moved a few rocks, saw your tail and, well, rest is obvious, I guess,” Bobby grunted roughly.

“Thank you. You saved my life,” Castiel said sincerely, even though it sounded too implausible to be true. His stone hadn’t blazed since he left Atlan and, even then, it hadn’t been bright enough to be seen from more than a hundred feet. He’d never heard of a stone emitting enough light to be seen for literal ‘miles’.

“Not necessarily,” the gruff man admitted. “Our witch says you can’t safely be moved further ‘til your head heals a bit more. And uncover your eyes too soon and your temporary blindness could become permanent. But the sharks are already circling. Probably sniffed your blood from miles away and headed right for you. We cleaned you up and bandaged the worst of it, but the bastards are still sniffing ‘round. Once them bastards get a scent, they don’t quit. Folks are still arguing ‘bout how long we can wait here. Gotta be honest. It probably ain’t gonna be as long as it’s gonna take for you to heal enough to move safely.”

“I’m blind?” Castiel asked, curiously. Oddly, the thought didn’t really bother him that much. He was, however, quite relieved to finally understand why everything seemed so impossibly dark.

“Like I said, the witch said it should be temporary as long as you keep your head still and let the swelling inside your skull ease a bit. Most of my clan have hunkered down about 20 miles west of here, where the seabed is more stable at the moment and there are some good natural caves. They won’t be moving on for several weeks, so if we could get you there you’d be golden. Actually getting you there is going to be a bitch, though. Ash is off looking for a wrecked ship. He reckons he could work out some kind of litter from wood planks that will keep your head and shoulders steady. Might work. He’s good at improvising stuff. He’d be smart enough to be a Singer if he didn’t spend most of his time off his head on Sarpa Salpa.”

“Sarpa what?”

“It’s Dreamfish,” the Mer chuckled. “It’s what the witch used on you, too. It’s a good painkiller but more than a little hallucinogenic. As if your head wasn’t already messed up enough from having a mountain fall on top of it. Get some sleep, we’ll talk later when you’re clearer-headed. Unless the sharks get us all first, of course.”

And Castiel thought the idea of being eaten by sharks should worry him but, well, sleep did seem like a wonderful idea. Yet even though he was feeling too out of it to truly care about himself, there was something he had to ask, had to know…

Heart suddenly pounding, though he was unsure whether it was with dread or with hope, he asked, “Is Dean here?”

There was a long thoughtful pause, then the gruff voice said, “No-one called Dean in my clan.”

And Castiel’s heart sank at the pronouncement. He’d thought… he’d hoped… Disappointment crushed down on him more savagely than the earlier rockfall. He stopped fighting to stay awake and just allowed the darkness to swallow him once more.

Time passed like the swelling and deflating of a sea sponge, stretching and contracting. Perhaps hours, perhaps even days, passed in his world of complete darkness. It proved impossible to track the passage of time because he would drift off into peculiar dreams between bouts of wakefulness. Though sometimes Castiel wondered whether he was also dreaming the times he imagined he was conscious, because even then he was still uncertain whether he was ever truly awake. The pain was steady, constant, but so was the feeling of detachment as though he were floating outside of his body and simply witnessing its suffering from without. Which was weird, he thought, since he thought the sensation of pain alone ought to be sufficient proof of life.

But nothing about the situation felt real. Why would the Destiny stone lead him into such a dangerous situation just so he could be rescued by total strangers? And the fact Bobby claimed they had come to rescue him because the stone was glowing as brightly as a star made no sense at all. Everything he knew about Destiny stones said that they only glowed with extraordinary brightness when they first activated and then again when the final destination of the wearer had been reached. But Dean wasn’t here. He wasn’t here in this place of his ancestors. Wasn’t waiting for him as Crowley had promised. So how could Castiel have reached the end of his journey here if his prize wasn’t also waiting here to be claimed? Trying to make sense of it, though, just caused the knives to dig deeper into his temple, so he just let the thought drift away and embraced the way the dreamfish let his mind escape the misery of his new reality as his thoughts fuzzed and grew dim.

At one point he thought he heard voices arguing in low, hushed tones. There was a woman’s voice, rich and mature, though her words were either fearful or angry. He wasn’t sure which, because the words were too far away and his head was filled with knives and nothing made sense. Though he thought she said, “So what if the stone’s lost, you idiot? That doesn’t mean anything. It already did what it needed to do, so it doesn’t matter, does it?”

“Of course it matters, Missouri. How will he know the truth if the stone is gone? That’s all I need, some Atlan princeling suffering a bad case of puppy love over my decrepit ass,” a man grumbled.  
Castiel thought it was Bobby, because it sounded like John. But then again, he decided, if he were to simply imagine the voice of a Wildling it would sound like John anyway, so again he wondered whether the whole thing was a dream after all.

“Stone or not, I wouldn’t worry about that. There’s no way that pup’s ever going to mistake you for his truemate. Trust me. Everything will work out in the end.”

And, as he slipped back into sleep again, Castiel groggily wondered what stone they meant. “I’ve got lots of stones,” he wanted to tell them. “They all fell on my head.”

The next time he woke, it was still dark.

It’s not dark. You’re blind, he reminded himself, and perhaps the effects of the dreamfish had finally worn off because he no longer felt so sanguine about the idea.

He also seemed to be lying on sand now, rather than seaweed.

“Have I moved?” he asked, though he was unsure whether anyone was there to answer.

“Only a few miles, for now,” a female voice replied. “It wasn’t safe to stay there any longer, but still wasn’t really safe to move you, either. This short distance was the compromise Bobby and I eventually agreed to with the others. A lot of shouting was involved. Be glad you slept through it.”

“You’re the witch he spoke of?” He questioned cautiously.

“Name’s Missouri,” she said. “Though I consider myself more of a healer than a witch. Still, a healer is definitely what you need right now, pup, so it’s just as well, isn’t it?”

“I’m not a pup,” he protested.

“What you are is a big ball of hurt with about as much chance of surviving alone out here as a fish in a net full of sharks, pup, so less of your sass,” she snapped. “You’re lucky our Singer is as soft as a sponge at heart, despite all his grumpy ways, because most of the clan voted to just leave you for the sharks to eat. And Rufus, the clan leader, is a pragmatic man. The only reason he let any of us stay with you at all was the fact Bobby tore a strip off his hide for trying to stop anyone volunteering to remain here. Not that many wanted to, anyway. Oh, don’t look so hurt. This isn’t Atlan. We don’t have the leisure to be sentimental fools. The clan always comes first. Can’t put everyone at risk for the sake of a single individual. Stranger or not. We’d be having the same arguments if you were of our own blood. People don’t want to risk their own lives when someone is as badly hurt as you are.”

Which made sense, he supposed. Bad enough to be stuck fighting sharks to defend a complete stranger. Far worse to do so if the stranger was liable to die regardless.

“Then why risk your lives to try to save me at all?” he asked, with genuine curiosity.

“Well, number one, we didn’t know how bad you were hurt until we’d already done the hard work of getting you out,” the witch said bluntly. “If we’d known, we probably wouldn’t have bothered, so be glad of our ignorance. Look, I’m sorry. I hate to be so brusque, but no point lying to you. It’s already been three days since we dug you out of those rocks and we’ve already gotten bloody a few times with sharks who were after easy pickings, so nobody’s willing to stay here for another week or so, until it’s definitely safe to move you, so it looks like you’ll just have to take your chances with us carrying you. Let’s just hope those idiots don’t drop you on your head again.”

“Again?

“Don’t ask.”

“My Destiny Stone led me to this place, Missouri, so, for some reason, this is exactly where I’m supposed to be,” Castiel replied calmly. “And if it’s now necessary to move me to ensure the safety of your people, then so be it. Maybe it will damage me further, maybe it won’t. Whatever happens, I believe that fate brought me to your clan deliberately.”

“Destiny Stone, Pah! You came to a live undersea volcano on a damned fool mission to find some stranger just because they’re supposed to be your truemate? You sure this is the first time you had a bunch of rocks fall on your head?” she demanded rudely.

Castiel chuckled, then winced as ever that slight movement sent a sensation like a knife through his head. “You’re right,” he agreed. “I have been a fool. But not about that. I didn’t come here in search of a stranger. That’s my only regret. That I didn’t just follow my heart months ago, instead of waiting for the Destiny stone to confirm what my heart already knew. Yet, even so, I think the journey I’ve made has been important, in itself, so perhaps I don’t regret anything. Well, except for the pain I caused him, obviously. Bobby said you found me because my Destiny stone was shining like a beacon. That means I’d already reached the end of my journey. I don’t understand how it’s so, since he isn’t here, but one way or another, this is the end of my song. This, somehow, is the destination I was always seeking.”

“Glad to hear you sounding so much more lucid. But the stone’s gone,” the witch said. “Just thought you should know that, straight off, before you come to any more conclusions about your song having ended. It came off when Bobby grabbed your neck to pull you out of that rockfall and, with all the sharks that were already circling by that point, no-one remembered to pick it up in the panic of getting you out of there. It’s probably either lying under a pile of rocks or sitting undigested in the belly of a shark.”

“Really?” Castiel asked, thoughtfully. “The necklace opened for Bobby? Then he’s the person my Destiny stone led me to meet. That’s very curious.”

“I’m sure he’ll be ecstatic to hear that,” she said dryly. “Though trust me, pup, he might be the highly respected Singer of all the clans, but he’s definitely not truemate material for anyone, let alone a youngling like you.”

Despite the gravity of the situation, humor bubbled up inside Castiel and he grinned in her approximate direction with genuine amusement. “You don’t understand,” he told her. “Of course he’s not my truemate. I already know who my truemate is. But Bobby, somehow, for some reason, is apparently the person I was led here to find. I talked to the witch king, Crowley, and he explained the difference to me. He told me how we Atlans completely misunderstood the way the stones worked.”

“Oh,” she said, her voice sounding surprisingly satisfied. Perhaps even relieved. “I knew that, pup. I just wasn’t sure whether you did. But that’s going to make everything a lot easier to resolve. Not to mention less embarrassing for everyone. Bobby’s been quite worried, to tell the truth. He thought you were going to jump all over him, cling like a limpet, and declare him your Destiny,” she chuckled.

**xxxx**

Despite Missouri’s blunt statement that the Hunters were intent on moving him regardless of whether or not he was well enough to travel, it was very quickly obvious that the decision hadn’t been taken lightly because all the Mer were as careful as possible to ensure his comfort for the journey. There appeared to be no malice in any of them and all seemed genuinely regretful that their insistence on moving him might cause him some unavoidable suffering. The two Mer appointed to pull him through the water, one on each side of him to keep him steady on the pallet a Mer named Ash had constructed, were polite and cheerful, even if their speech was a little rough around the edges, and both assured him they had willingly volunteered for the task.

Perhaps it was the copious doses of dreamfish that Missouri supplied, but Castiel slept through the majority of the relocation, anyway. He only realized he had arrived at their final destination because, when he awoke again, he could feel he was inside some structure because the flow of water around his skin was almost negligible. He sent out a low web of song and it echoed back to tell him he was located within a deep, narrow, tunnel-like cave.

It was slightly alarming, in that there was clearly only one way in or out of the tunnel, and under normal circumstances he would have felt vulnerable and trapped. But in the distance, down towards the place where the cave met the open Ocean, he could hear the voices of unfamiliar Mer, so it was reasonable to assume they were guarding the entrance to prevent predators from swimming inside.

Now that he was in a safe place, Missouri began to cut his doses of dreamfish down considerably. He was glad of it. The pain became more real but it remained at a manageable level and, undoubtedly, he could tell with every passing day that his body was gradually healing itself. He began to be able to move his hands and arms without feeling like they were ripping out of his shoulders with every movement and the knifing sensations in his ribs soon dulled to a throbbing ache that only felt sharp when he rolled over. The ache in his head also eased with every passing day until it no longer felt like the kelp bandage over his eyes was the only thing preventing them from being pushed out of his skull by the unbearable pressure behind them.

It was almost three weeks after the rock fall before Missouri finally decided it was time to remove the kelp wrapped around his eyes and allow him to attempt to see once more. “It’s time you started trying to swim again, before all your tail muscles atrophy, but best if you can see where you’re going. Don’t need new bruises on top of the old.”

She seemed confident he would be able to see. Castiel didn’t question her conviction, since he’d refused to even contemplate the possibility of being permanently blind anyway. The idea he would never see Dean’s face again was absolutely unthinkable, so he completely, stubbornly, refused to listen to any of her warnings as the bandages were removed.

Well, except for the one to keep his eyes tightly squeezed shut during the process and then to open them extremely slowly.

So he was completely unprepared for the moment he did open his eyes and saw nothing but darkness.

His heart leapt into his chest as he immediately panicked. “I can’t see,” he snarled. “I can’t see anything.”

“Wait a moment. Let yourself gradually adjust,” Missouri said, calmly.

Adjust to what? It was totally black. He couldn’t see anything. Well, except for vague dark shapes, he realized. And maybe it wasn’t totally black. More a dark grey. Randomly interspersed with lighter grays.

“It’s like the night sky at the surface,” he said, aloud, as the world came into monochrome focus around him.

“You’re down the far end of an unlit cave. Of course it’s pitch dark in here,” Missouri snapped. “You weren’t listening to a word I said, were you? I didn’t want to take the risk of doing damage to you if it turned out we’d removed the bandages a little too soon. Better you start in here, let your eyes remember how to see at all, then as we move closer to the entrance you can begin to adjust to seeing color again. Come. It is time,” she added, and somehow her words carried a deeper portent, an implication that it was time for more than simply the restoration of his sight.

Torn between curiosity, embarrassment and relief, Castiel slowly, painfully, followed as she led him towards the cave entrance to finally meet the rest of the clan.

There were twenty-six adults and eight pups of various ages. Castiel had spoken to several of them already, since the people who had brought him food into the cave had rotated depending on their other responsibilities, but seeing them, putting faces to names, was peculiar.

They all had Wildling coloring, exotic flame-colored tails in hues from golden-orange to darkest reds, but their hair ranged from white-blonde to black and their skin tones were so varied that it was evident that they weren’t simply an extended family group, as he’d previously assumed.

Both Rufus, the clan leader, and Missouri, the sea witch, had skin the dark, glorious color of Sandbar sharks. Bobby and Ash were both even paler than himself. The rest of the clan were a rainbow of every shade in-between. So it was clear from that variation alone that very few of the adults were related by blood.

They were ‘family’ though, Bobby insisted. Bound together with tethers far more intricate and precious than blood. A family of choice rather than circumstance.

And every single one of them, from the tiniest pup to the oldest adult, bore scars on their bodies that spoke of a brutal history. Of bites, sharp rocks, and spouting volcanic lava. Their bodies were strong but, although none looked ill-fed, all were as leanly muscled as sharks themselves, their bodies honed to be tools of survival in this hostile environment. There was not one ounce of spare flesh on their bodies. No softness to their lines. There was nothing soft or pretty about them at all, despite several of them having faces almost as beautiful as Dean’s. These were not Mer who would ever simply sit in Atlan and read books about life. These proud, terrifying Mer were living life. And life was clearly riding them harshly.

Intrigued and fascinated, he spent his first few hours within the clan demanding Bobby explain how the Clans were organized, what caused them to group as they did, why they never congregated together in larger groups, question after question until the Singer finally gave up trying to speak his answers and instead began to sing to him and, questions forgotten, Castiel lay spellbound and just let the knowledge wash over him like a tide.

Unlike his gruff spoken voice, the Singer sang, not necessarily melodically, but with a pure stunning clarity that rang through Castiel’s body with the resonance of a thousand tiny bells. Bobby sang for hours. Sang until his voice was barely a croak and yet still Castiel’s nerves thrummed with Bobby’s song. He sang the history of the ‘people’, a song of adversity and triumph, of terrible losses and wonderful beginnings, of hunting and of finding and of losing, of pups born and oldsters gone forever. He sang of real things and myths, though sometimes it was hard for Castiel to tell one from the other. Then he sang a terrible song of impending death and destruction, of the greed and selfish carelessness of the Hu, of the world of the Clans being destroyed forever and, finally, a song of hope, of a once-lost pup returning to accept his epic destiny. A pup, now grown to a man, who would gather the Clans and lead them to safety together. A man who had finally arrived amongst them. Of hope thought lost yet now reborn.

And as the song faded, as the last notes dissipated into the water around the huddled Mer, Castiel met Bobby’s old, wise gaze and his heart pounded a beat of Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean and he knew. Knew absolutely and without question that there was a reason Bobby had chosen to say, “No-one called Dean in my clan.”

He’d missed it entirely. Maybe it had been the drugs or the pain or just the shock of waking up at all, when he’d been so certain he’d never wake up again.

Bobby hadn’t asked “Who is Dean?”.

He hadn’t said, “Never heard of anyone called Dean.”

He had specifically said, “No-one called Dean in my clan”.

And Castiel knew.

“Where is he?” he demanded, his voice a rough, angry bark of accusation.

Bobby just blinked slowly, and then he shrugged. “Not exactly sure right now,” he said. “But he’s a damned strong swimmer. He’s probably literally a third of the way around the world already. Depends how long he stops to talk to each clan leader as he goes. And how many people he manages to pick up along the way, of course. The more successful he is, the longer he’ll be gone. We’re expecting he won’t get back for another month or two. We’re hoping it will take at least three. So there was no rush to say anything. It’s not like the information is going to be of any use to you yet, is it?”

Castiel ground his teeth in frustration, relief warring inside him with furious hurt.

“But you should have told me. Why didn’t you tell me? It’s been weeks, Bobby. Weeks of me not knowing whether he’d even made it down to the equator alive and all the time you knew who he was, what he means to me. He’s my truemate. I deserved to know where he was. You should have told me.”

“Why?” Clan leader Rufus interrupted, with a snarl of irritation. “We didn’t know whether you were going to survive at all,” he pointed out bluntly. “And, even if you did, we didn’t know if you’d end up blind. Helpless. A burden on us all. On him. A liability he couldn’t afford. Definitely a liability he would refuse to leave. Dean has a Destiny. He has a duty to the people. A duty he’s willingly accepted. We already let one damned Atlan steal our hope away. We weren’t going to let you become the second Atlan to sentence our people to death.”

Castiel flinched from the bitter anger in the old Mer’s voice. He wanted to be angry, himself, at the heartlessness of the words but all around him he could see the scarred Mer of the clan, the pups who bore the visible evidence of their dangerous lives.

“I don’t think ‘willingly’ is completely accurate,” Missouri interrupted, arching a brow at Rufus. “More like ‘too damned heartbroken to care one way or the other whether becoming the hero we need him to be gets him killed.’ He was just looking for something, anything, to give him a reason to keep breathing when he first arrived here. And we selfishly gave him one. Go us.”

“And it’s obvious to all of us,” Bobby told Rufus, “that what Prince Castiel of Atlan here really is, is a damned good reason for Dean to arrive back here then change his mind about leading the migration, and instead just leave like his father did before him. Dean might have a ‘destiny,’ but the truth is he owes us nothing. Which is why you didn’t want us to save Castiel at all.”

“I don’t deny it,” Rufus shrugged unapologetically. “Nothing personal, pup,” he told Castiel. “This is too big, too important. It’s not about you or Dean, as individuals. So I’m sorry. But I’m not sorry.”

“The clan always comes first,” Castiel quoted, remembering Missouri’s words. He thought he ought to be angry. But, peculiarly, he wasn’t. If anything, he felt like a thousand different pieces had just fallen into place and formed a picture he could see and understand.

He was relieved he had regained his eyesight before this conversation. Understanding would have been far more difficult without the ability to see the emotions passing over the other Mers’ expressive faces. The ‘people’ weren’t like Atlans. They didn’t waste time with social niceties. They were too blunt and matter-of-fact in nature to bandy words about. But their sometimes-harsh turns of phrase were often belied by their expressions. They cared very much for their people. He understood that now. It was easier to understand a lot more things with the benefit of his restored sight. Easier to appreciate the dangers the clans lived with now he could see that every member of this clan bore the visible scars from their lives in this terrible, dangerous environment.

“This region has never been an easy place to live,” Bobby said, as though he could read Castiel’s mind, in a tone and cadence subtly altered to a formal gravitas as he spoke in his capacity as the ‘Singer of the Clans’. “The equator has always been the place where Pontus and Gaia seem unable to agree whether land or sea should ultimately preside. The sea quakes are not new phenomena. But something has definitely changed significantly over the last decade. The water is darker, filled with the taste of death from the mountain-sized ships that persistently move overhead. Everywhere is changing. The entire world seems somehow to be heating up. The ice at the poles is melting and the earth beneath the sea is angry, Castiel. Gaia shifts and grumbles and spits her displeasure. Pontus responds by sending huge tsunamis that rip through the oceans so furiously they often build into mountains of water at the surface that reclaim Gaia’s islands and drag them back into the sea. Where once a high magnitude quake only happened every few years, it seems now that almost all the equatorial zone is suffering several high level quakes every year.

“This battleground of the gods is no longer a safe place for the Clans to dwell. It’s long past time our people left this place and moved where the waters are quieter, cooler. Had the problem been so dire a dozen years ago, I expect Johannes would have been the one to lead the clan to a new home. He was born with a Destiny. Missouri’s predecessor spoke it on his naming day. That Johannes was destined to become the ‘charmer’. The only one whom the leaders of all the Clans would ever have trusted enough to follow to a new home.”

“Complete nonsense. Johannes was a blunt man with an inflexible dogmatism. He won most of his arguments with his claws. He couldn’t have charmed his way out of a clamshell,” Rufus scoffed. “Good riddance to him, I say.”

“Whatever bitter people say in retrospect, it was not Johannes’ fault he didn’t fulfill his destiny,” Bobby said, with a glare at Rufus. “Because no one knew what was coming. No one wanted to leave here and so none argued when he denied the burden of his destiny because he had a new mate and a young pup to protect. He feared for their survival on such a quest and he believed that Maré’s destiny had overwritten his own. By choosing him as her truemate, he believed she had rewritten his song.

“Until Missouri, fresh in her role and completely devoid of any tact, insisted that Destiny would not be forever denied, so it now would be Johannes’ pup who would be destined to unite the clans and lead them to a new home. She said he was the one with such an epic song to sing. And, nobody argued since no one really wanted to leave, because, well, no matter how bad things get it’s always easier to deal with the known than the unknown, isn’t it? Inertia is a powerful force against change. So it suited folks to accept the further delay, to shrug and say there was plenty of time and that waiting til the pup grew was for the best for everyone.

“And then another pup was born and, Missouri spoke his destiny, and Johannes’ response was to leave the clans entirely. He took his whole family and went North to Atlan, and that was that. Folks said it was meant to be, was a sign that the clans weren’t supposed to move at all, and things settled down here. Everyone forgot Missouri’s warnings altogether until the really bad quakes started a few years back.

“And, sure, some people inevitably started talking about moving again, but we’re not like you Northern Mer. We don’t have kings or royalty. We’re just dozens of individual, independent groups who rarely gather together without things descending into fighting and arguments and differences of opinion. Sure, we work together whenever there’s a common enemy, but try to get even just two different clans together to settle a minor dispute and it rarely works out without blood being drawn. Thing is, you don’t get to be a clan leader in a place like this if you aren’t a warrior. Every clan is led by some cuss as ornery as all get-out. So we have several dozen clans, each led by a Mer who has proved themselves a great warrior and is used to his or her word being law, and then you try getting those guys together to come up with a migration plan they all agree on?

“And so the clans have waited, and waited, growing ever fewer in number, and still they don’t accept that Destiny has spoken her final warnings. That remaining here is nothing except slow suicide.”

Castiel frowned. “But you’re the Singer of all the Clans, the one who knows all the history and lore of your people. Surely they listen to you?”

The older Mer shrugged and grinned wryly. “You’d like to think so, but not so much. No point being a Singer unless I have a song that people are willing to listen to. They still listen to Missouri here, of course, since they’re scared not to. But in this matter she’s been as much use as a knife made of limp seaweed, because all she ever said, whenever things got heated enough to require her intervention, was that Johannes’ pup was destined to lead us all to our new home, that only he would have the ‘charm’ to unify the clans, so we just had to be patient and wait for him to return to us.”

“Suck it up, old man,” Missouri snorted. “I was right, wasn’t I?”

Bobby didn’t deny it.

Castiel wasn’t surprised. He remembered how Dean had woven his spell throughout the entire inhabitants of Atlan, how he had eventually crashed through all barriers of prejudice and resistance with his relentless charm offensive.

That was Dean’s power, Dean’s particular unique magic.

Yes, Dean was a charmer. Was the charmer. The one Mer whose soul somehow shone so brightly that none could withstand the power of its righteousness. He could see how, one by one, the leaders of all the clans would fall beneath the spell of Castiel’s truemate.

“So all of this, it was always about Dean, the one fated to gather the clans and lead them to safety,” Castiel said. “My destiny stone. My journey. All of it. It was never about me at all, was it? Everything was about ensuring Dean came home to you.”

Missouri smiled at him gently, her eyes kind. “I wouldn’t go quite that far, Castiel. Of course it was about you, too. Johannes and Maré tried to do the impossible. Tried to change fate entirely. But, as always, fate was several steps ahead of them and was always ready to fight back. It adapted. It changed. It persevered. You have your own brand of magic, too.”

Castiel shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said, his tone completely devoid of bitterness. “But that’s really not important because I understand now,” he said. “My own journey was never ‘epic’. So it wasn’t ever intended to become a song. My Destiny has always been only to help write Dean’s song. And Dean’s song is so important that being able to help it come to pass is a more than sufficient Destiny, in itself.”

“In a way,” she agreed, “though Dean’s song is not the only one your destiny has written with your journey to this place. In all your years of studying with Rowena, did she not teach you the one song we Mer long to come to pass? The Lament of the Hu?”

Castiel frowned as he raked his memory, then shook his head. “Songs are not the way of Atlan,” he confessed.

Missouri sighed. “So much is lost when too much is gained,” she said. “As much as we envy the safe lives of your people, in remaining here we have remained in awe of the gods whilst your people have locked themselves within a prison of their own making and perhaps forgotten the gods entirely.”

“Surely there is a middle ground,” Castiel suggested tentatively. “A way to find safety without caging ourselves away from the world?”

“We hope so,” she agreed.

“What does the Lament of the Hu sing of?”

“There’s a prophecy that, not many years from now, when the fate of all Mer is threatened as the world warms and the seas overflow with the melting ice of the poles, the Lament of the Hu will be the song sung amongst the land monsters. A song so haunting and pure and right that all the Hu will finally open their eyes and see. Will remember, perhaps, when they were mansfish, too. Will remember Pontus’ warning that they must bring no harm to the seas. Will remember, finally, the covenant they share with the entire world they live on. And the song will lead them to right the wrongs they have done. And the song will have a singer. And her hair will be the color of the sun above and her eyes will be the color of the waters below, and her name will be…” and she paused, waiting, willing him to understand.

He frowned, puzzled, confused, until suddenly it came to him so suddenly it was as though Pontus himself had whispered the word into his ear.

“Claire,” Castiel breathed, his eyes damp with tears of wonder. “Her name will be Claire.”

Missouri smiled and nodded. “You see? All happens for a reason, pup.”

**xxxx**

“I’ve finally got it. The perfect place. Bouvet Island,” Castiel said, several days later, as he and Bobby were sharing a quiet meal of clams together.

Because of Bobby’s suggestion that he could spend his time waiting for Dean’s return helping to find some potential locations for the Clans to move to, he had been rifling through his memories, turning page after page of stored knowledge, of remembrances of every map he’d ever seen, every story he’d ever read in the books of both Mer and Hu. He had a lot of stored knowledge to sift through, which was why it had taken days rather than hours.

“Huh?” Bobby grunted, spitting out a shell before looking at him curiously.

“That’s what the land monsters call it. Bouvet Island. It’s close to the southern pole, well below any of the regular shipping routes of the Hu. An uninhabited nature reserve for seals and penguins and other birds. Almost completely covered by a glacier. But it’s actually a totally inactive volcano lying in water nearly 8000 feet deep. And where there once were volcanoes, there are going to be caverns and lava tunnels and caves. A whole island’s worth of them. And I know you people don’t want to replicate Atlan, don’t want to create a city, as such, but it still makes sense to create a permanent, safe home-base large enough for everyone to live in. The clans can still come and go as they will. But they’d know they would always have a home to come back to. Somewhere pups could be raised safely and oldsters could rest when their hunting days are done.”

Bobby nodded thoughtfully. “I agree. We can’t refuse to change our ways at all and still expect the ultimate outcome to be different. Some compromise is going to be necessary. I don’t think the _people_ have a fundamental objection to having a ‘city’. They just don’t want to feel they have to permanently live in it. And they sure as hell don’t want city-type rules or rulers. The island sounds good, except it’s probably pretty much guaranteed that most of the tunnels and caves are going to be packed with solid ice if it’s that far south,” Bobby pointed out.

“Ice is a lot easier to carve out than solid rock,” Castiel argued. “I’m not saying it will be easy, but nothing worthwhile ever is. Anyway, you guys are always going on about how ‘soft’ we Atlans are… so it’ll be a chance to show me just how tough you lot really are.”

The older Mer chuckled. “Good point,” he agreed. “But speaking of ice, it’s going to be pretty damned cold everywhere down there.”

“We’ll learn to adapt,” Castiel shrugged. “And we aren’t talking impossibly cold, anyway. From what I remember, the temperature is not much different there than it is in the far north where the Scanda live. My mom was from Scanda and she said it wasn’t any colder near the surface there than it was on the seabed in Atlan. Which I guess also means it’s going to be very cold 8000 feet down at Bouvet. So, well, we just won’t swim that far down yet. It might take a few generations before the clans feel ready to explore the deeper water there, but there’s more than enough food available in the shallower waters. The waters are rich there.”

“You said ‘we’,” Bobby pointed out. “So you intend to stay with us? You aren’t planning on returning to Atlan after you reunite with your truemate? Because you could. Set an ultimatum, tell Dean you want to go back there and it’ll happen. Destiny or not. After all, it was Johannes’ Destiny to lead the clans and he opted out and got away with it. Destiny isn’t a vengeful bitch. Dean could opt out, too. No consequences at all this time. It’s not like you two are going to have a pup for Destiny to shift the responsibility forward to, is it?”

Castiel smiled. “No disrespect to John, but Dean is not his father. Dean isn’t the kind of person who would ever turn his back on people once he considers them family. Like you yourself say, family isn’t about blood. It’s about loyalty and emotional ties. Whatever was going on in Dean’s head when he agreed to help you all, I know him. He made you a promise. The fact that his options have now changed won’t ever make him go back on his word.”

Bobby didn’t look totally convinced. “But Dean isn’t as invested in us as he is in you. You two have got history together. All Dean really knows about us is that his parents left us when they decided Atlan was a safer place to raise a family. I think it was hard for Dean to leave his family in Atlan. It was definitely hard for him to leave his brother. It wouldn’t take much persuading from you to convince him to do what Maré did. He’d break his word for you.”

Castiel shrugged a shoulder. Bobby’s concerns were fair enough, he decided, but it was time to lay them to rest forever. “Maybe, maybe not. The situation isn’t comparable. I’m not the mother of two tiny, vulnerable pups. Missouri told me what happened with Sam. That it was bad enough she had told Maré about Dean having an epic destiny. When Missouri said Sam was destined to be your successor, I think Dean’s mom just panicked, grabbed both her pups and ran. But talking of Sam, I guess if it is his destiny to return home to the people and become the Singer of the clans, then Dean and I staying South will probably be the impetus he’ll need to come find us when he comes of age himself. We’ve got a few years yet. Time to get the clans settled near Bouvet and then, maybe, Dean and I can make the journey to Atlan together to bring him to our new home. Hell, maybe John and Maré will come back with us too.”

“They’d be welcome to,” Bobby admitted gruffly, looking a lot more relaxed now. “No one blamed Maré for her choice. Nor Johannes’ decision to go with her. Well, not for long, anyway. Too many pups have been lost to the quakes in the last ten years or so for anyone to hold on to any resentment about their decision to protect their own. People know enough about the dangers now, hopefully, that Dean might be returning here with several dozen clans worth of people willing to relocate.”

Castiel nodded. “I know him well enough to believe that he will convince all of them to come.”

Bobby chuckled. “I can’t fault your loyalty towards your truemate, but I think it’s highly improbable,” he said. “Still, I do believe he’ll almost certainly win over several dozen of the less-truculent clans.”

Castiel just shrugged. “Either way, time is going to be of the essence. The migration needs to be over and done with before winter sets in here and the seas turn storm-whipped. So we need to stop just waiting for Dean to come back. He might be destined to lead the Clans but he can’t possibly be expected to do everything himself. We need to help him. Need to get ready for his return. We need to start stockpiling provisions, both for the people staying here for now and those joining the first expedition.”

“First expedition?” Bobby queried.

“Well, as you said, Bouvet is probably solid ice at the moment. It would make most sense to leave the pups and the older folks here for now, and just send the strongest Mer down South to get the place more suitable for habitation. Don’t you think?”

“You’re on a roll, pup,” Bobby waved a hand graciously, “Carry on, tell me the rest of this grand plan of yours.”

Castiel flushed but continued. “Let’s work on the assumption we need food for, say, sixty full-grown Mer for a journey of 5000 miles. If they’re fit and healthy, carry food with them, and don’t need to stop to hunt along the way, the journey will take about two weeks, give or take. So I reckon we need at least the equivalent of 10 or 12 whole swordfish to provision them for the journey. It would need to be preserved for the journey, though. Salted, perhaps. We need to ensure it doesn’t create a blood scent for sharks. And, obviously, we need a way for that food to be carried.

“So I think we’d need some kind of packs for everyone, large enough for each Mer to carry their own food but without restricting their ability to swim, or fight if necessary, and to carry tools, too. Spears and knives aren’t going to work well for cutting ice. But I remember seeing pictures of land monster tools in Rowena’s archives. Spades and picks… well, I can draw them if there’s someone here who can make them.”

“Talk to Ash. Get him to organize it. The benefit of living near live volcanoes is we have a lot of metalworking skills, plus a lot of land monster wrecks to get the raw material off to work with. Anchors, chains, all those things are easy to smelt and repurpose,” Bobby told him. “There are a few clans nearby. Enough people to get onto the production of bags and tools.”

“Then, um, you think my suggestion is good?” Castiel asked, chewing his lower lip nervously. “What about Rufus? Do you think he’d listen to me if I told him this idea?”

“You leave Rufus to me. I think it’s damned obvious now why fate wanted you to be Dean’s truemate, and I’ll make no bones in telling him so,” Bobby replied bluntly. “There’s been a few folk muttering, wondering why some ‘pampered prince’ from Atlan would be the ideal partner for Dean. Worrying, I guess, that even if you didn’t talk him into returning North with you, that you’d still be nothing more than a pretty distraction for him. A liability when everyone needs him to be concentrating solely on saving them. Selfish, I know, but imminent threats of death kind of have a way of making people feel a bit self-centered like that. So they worry you might cost them their lives. But that’s ‘cos they don’t really know you, yet. They know you are destined to be Dean’s singer, but they don’t yet realize you’re a Singer.”

“Oh, I don’t think that can be true. I don’t sing at all well,” Castiel replied honestly. “I can manage a conversation with dolphins and whales but, trust me, no one wants to hear me sing. Even my echolocation is tone deaf.”

“You think anyone likes listening to me sing?” Bobby snorted. “They don’t listen for pleasure, pup. They listen because it’s the only way to access all the histories and knowledge in my head. I can’t read or write. None in the clans has that skill. All of our knowledge lives in songs, passed down from one Singer to the next and that’s how information eventually gets lost or twisted. It inevitably gets altered by the telling. Atlans, for all we mock your ways, have got that much right. Recording knowledge permanently, writing it down, is the only way to preserve the integrity of information. That’s what Missouri saw, in Sam’s destiny, that he would be a new kind of Singer for the clans. So, in retrospect, it makes sense he had to go to Atlan to learn how to become that new type of Singer. A Singer like you.”

Castiel blinked uncertainly. “So you’re saying a ‘Singer’ is simply the clans’ version of a scholar?”

“Well, I guess a Bard would be nearer the truth,” Bobby said. “Singers compose and recite the histories of the clans, and pass those songs down so that information can be passed from one generation to the next. As a reader and writer, you also perform that exact same function but even better, I believe, because you have read the histories of other Mer, even the histories of the Humans. And here, now, you come up with ways to plan for a journey that I simply would be incapable of replicating because no journey of this type exists in our history. We have no prior experience to draw upon. Without your input, I suspect we would have just set off on a mass migration in a vague direction, hoping food would be sufficient, hoping shelter would be found, hoping a destination would be reached and, inevitably, many people would have perished along the way.

“So, trust me, Castiel, you are a Singer. And, more than that, you are _exactly_ the Singer we need right now.”

**xxxx**

They were spotted by a hunting party, four months, two weeks and five days after Castiel was crushed under an avalanche of falling stone.

Scores of Mer.

Dozens upon dozens.

Perhaps they even numbered in the many hundreds.

The Mer who had raced back to prepare them for Dean’s arrival was too excited, too overawed, to know for sure.

“He brought everyone,” she shouted, so loudly that her cry reverberated throughout the whole settlement. And, though that seemed impossible, Castiel was certain it was probably true, regardless. What was one more miracle, in the grand scheme of things?

Destiny might not be a vengeful bitch, but she sure as hell didn’t seem to do things by halves.

Besides, he could understand everyone wanting to follow Dean.

What seemed more impossible to comprehend was how he had ever left him.

His heart was pounding a manic rhythm, a furious pulse of Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean.

And he wanted to follow the flood of Mer who raced outside of their temporary cave homes in response to the news. Swim out of his cave with the momentum of a shooting star, hurtle towards his truemate, throw his arms around him, touch him, hug him, kiss him.

Claim him.

He forced himself to wait.

Alone in a cave filled with stacks of bags stuffed full of salted fish and tools and weapons, of maps drawn from memory and plans etched painstakingly on flat, flinty stones. A vast cavern full of offerings to Dean. A dowry, perhaps… or so he dared to hope.

But he waited.

Despite every bone in his body telling him to dash outside to meet the arriving party of Mer.

Despite his soul reaching out in desperate yearning for the part of itself that had been so brutally amputated almost a full year earlier.

Despite his tail twitching and flicking with sufficient agitation to make the water swirl in the cave like a miniature whirlpool.

Wait, he told himself.

Wait.

Let him find out from the others.

Let him choose whether to come.

Let him have his moment of returning glory in the presence of everyone, and then let our own reuniting moment be small and private, he told himself.

If Dean even chose to come.

Please, please, let him come, he prayed to someone, anyone.

Please let him forgive me enough to come.

And so he waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Until the mass of excited voices outside broke into separate, distinct groupings of chatter, then settled to low indistinct murmurs as the masses of new arrivals were presumably separated and led to the caverns already prepared for them in hope.

And still he waited.

Alone, in his cave filled with offerings.

Until, like a miracle, the wait was over and Dean was there, impossibly beautiful, hovering hesitantly in the cave entrance, his flame-colored tail beating a frantic rhythm of its own as though he didn’t know whether to enter or to flee.

For an endless moment their eyes locked and all Castiel could see was green, green, green, green, and his heart pulsed, Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean, and he could barely breathe, and though his mouth worked furiously, no words emerged. They all stuck in his throat, choking him as he struggled not to simply burst into tears.

And it was Dean who saved him.

Brave, bold, wonderful Dean who, as always, reached out the hand of friendship, even in the face of Castiel’s silence.

“I couldn’t believe it when they said you were here,” Dean said, his face unnaturally pale and his green eyes haunted and wary, despite the broad smile on his face. “I thought you… well… I never expected to see you again. I don’t know what to think. What to say. Except… I missed you, Cas. I really, really missed you.”

“This is where my Destiny stone led me,” Castiel replied softly. “Where it was always destined to lead me. Back to you. My truemate.”

Dean’s mouth twisted, as though he’d tasted something bitter. “That makes no sense. None of any of this makes sense. And the stone’s lost now, anyway, isn’t it? Bobby already told me. So you don’t know, can’t know for sure, that I really am your truemate. Can you?” he challenged, though his tone was more distraught than angry.

“I don’t care,” Castiel said, with brutal honesty.

Dean’s eyes went huge with shock.

Castiel shrugged. “I mean; I DO know you are my truemate. I can’t prove it, okay, I’ll give you that, but it doesn’t even matter because I don’t _care_ , either way. I was barely a few weeks away from Atlan when I came to my senses and realized the only mate I ever wanted was you. I tried to turn around, tried to take the stone off and drop it down a ravine, tried to go back to you. I swear it’s true. Please know that it’s true. But the stone wouldn’t let me turn around, so I had no choice except to carry on, knowing when I met my supposed ‘truemate’ I would do so only to be able to remove the stone and then turn around and come back to you. I was always going to come home to you. You need to know that. Need to believe it. I… well, I missed you, too, Dean.”

“You did?” Dean asked, his expression shifting back and forth between hope and disbelief.

“Every hour of every day. Missed you so much I eventually couldn’t wait any longer. Couldn’t bear to be apart from you for even a moment more. So I went to the King of the Witches himself, Crowley, and I was ready to sell my soul, if necessary, just to be able to break the thrall of the stone and swim back into your arms. Only, it turned out that it wasn’t necessary to do anything except keep following where the stone led me because, Crowley told me, it was leading me to here, anyway. Leading me back to you. And, he was right because, well, here I am and here _you_ are.”

“But… but in Atlan, it didn’t… didn’t…”

“Only because you weren’t where you were supposed to be,” Castiel explained gently. “Our lives, our souls, were always destined to become entwined, Dean, but you were never supposed to be in Atlan. I was always supposed to meet you _here_. You already know your father turned his back on his destiny, by going to Atlan, don’t you?”

“He was protecting his family,” Dean protested.

“I know. I meant no censure. I’m just saying he had a destiny and he refused it and, in doing so, that destiny moved forward a generation to you.”

“I know,” Dean agreed, his eyes haunted. “And I…um… that’s the thing. I accepted it. I’m sorry, Cas. So sorry. But I didn’t know… couldn’t have known… I can’t… um… can’t come back with you. I mean yet. I don’t mean ever. Don’t… oh damn… don’t think I’m rejecting you. I… I don’t have the words… I’m not good at this talking stuff… please don’t misunderstand me… I want nothing more than to go back to Atlan with you right this minute. And I will, I swear, don’t give up on me. Please. Being your truemate… even just being your mate… hell, having you in any way I can… well, I can’t even begin to tell you what… shit… It’s too much to even take in. You’re everything, Cas. Everything I always wanted. Just you. Only you. But… um… I just… um… I just need some more time…” he blurted.

“Because you’ve promised to lead the clans to a new home and you can’t break that promise?” Castiel suggested gently.

Dean’s jaw dropped and he just blinked stupidly for a moment. “Yeah, but how… um… you already know?”

“Of course I know, you assbutt. What do you think Bobby and I have been doing all these months whilst we waited for you to get back here? Though we didn’t expect you to arrive with _everyone_. I think we might definitely need some more swordfish now,” Castiel added, with a frown. “We only provisioned to feed a few dozen extra mouths around here, in addition to the sixty who’ll be coming to Bouvet with us. I had better send some of your new guys fishing before we set off.”

“Coming to where? And what do you mean us?”

“Try to keep up,” Castiel said, airily. “While you were busy doing your charm offensive and rounding up the Clans, Bobby and I have organized a two-stage migration. You need to pick 60-odd of the strongest warriors to come with us to get Bouvet ready. It’s a long way from here and we expect it to be pretty inhospitable at the minute. We figure it’ll take a month or two to get it ready for initial occupation, and then some of us will obviously have to come back to escort the others down. So the second migration is scheduled for three months later. We’re expecting the second group will take twice as long traveling, because of the pups and the oldsters. Even so, all the clans will be just about settled in our new home before the storm season hits these waters.”

“You… you’re not going back to Atlan?” Dean asked, still looking shell-shocked.

“Well, I’m not particularly bothered one way or the other whether we ever return there or not but, eventually, I think we’ll have to go back there to see your family, anyway,” Castiel said, with a shrug. “Bobby thinks Sam’s Destiny will be with the clans, and I’d hate him to take the same journey as we did on his own, so we should probably offer to keep him company on the journey. Plus, I think I might be able to convince Rowena to ‘lend’ us some Land Monster books. Starting a new colony is going to be a leap into the unknown for all of us and some of the Hu histories she has might prove particularly useful.”

“You’ve changed. You used to be quiet. Shy. Kinda fragile,” Dean said, his expression confused rather than critical, as Castiel continued to fire a list of practical considerations in his direction.

“Of course I’ve changed,” Castiel agreed easily. “I’ve faced near-certain death several times and I’ve swum across half the world to reclaim my truemate. The fact I only had to do it because I was stupid enough to mislay you in the first place just made the whole thing more aggravating until I understood why we were supposed to be _here_. And once I did, I decided the best way to support you was to get things moving in your absence.”

“I don’t… um… don’t understand what’s happening here,” Dean admitted, looking stunned and confused.

“Of course you don’t. But that’s fine, Dean. If you recall, I never kept you around for your scintillating intellect,” Castiel teased cautiously, eyes sparkling with gentle humor. It was a risk, he knew, but teasing, laughing, was what they did, how they _were_. He needed to remind Dean of how it had been between them before he had ripped Dean’s heart out and thrown it away like so much garbage. Give me a chance, he prayed. Forgive me, he prayed. Laugh with me again. Like me again. _Love_ me again. “You just keep doing the big, butch hero routine, keeping all the clan leaders wrapped around your fingers, and leave all the boring practical stuff to me. I’m a prince, after all. Organizing things and bossing people around is in my job description. Or, at least, that’s what Bobby tells me whenever he gets bored and disappears and leaves me handling stuff on my own.”

“So…um… since you didn’t need my brain, what exactly did you keep me around for?” Dean asked, his own eyes creasing with cautious laughter.

“Would you feel objectified if I said the view?” Castiel asked lightly, though inside he was running happy cartwheels that Dean was making it so easy, so right. Just as Dean had always done. Dean, who’d always been on his side, even when Dean himself was the recipient of Castiel’s wrongdoing.

I don’t deserve you, he thought. But he was selfish enough to grasp for Dean’s love anyway, deserved or not.

“Only in a good way,” Dean replied, with a faint smirk.

“But that’s not true, of course,” Castiel said.

Dean’s face fell.

“Because that would imply only the view. And whilst you are undoubtedly the most attractive Mer I have ever seen,” Castiel continued, because it was time for total honesty, “the primary reason I kept you around is that you complete me, Dean. I didn’t even realize how much until we were apart and it felt as though I had torn my own soul in two. That’s how I realized you had to be my truemate, because there wasn’t enough of me left, without you, to offer to anybody else. At the risk of sounding overly poetic, being without you is like night without day, or heat without cold, or up without down, or right without wrong, or….”

“You totally rehearsed that whole speech, didn’t you?” Dean interrupted, eyes narrowed suspiciously.

“Totally,” Castiel agreed. “Every night and every day, ever since I came to my senses and prayed I’d one day have the opportunity to say it to your face. I’ve said those words to your memory a hundred thousand times and, still, I haven’t said them enough. I want to say them every day of the rest of my life, if only you will be with me to hear them.”

“Damn you,” Dean choked. “Stop it. I wanna be mad at you. I _deserve_ to be mad at you.”

“You do,” Castiel agreed sadly. “You have every reason to tell me I’m too late. That you’ve found someone else or that you just don’t trust me not to trample on your heart again. You deserve so much better than me, Dean. You deserve a truemate who would never break your heart. You deserve…”

“Well, clearly I obviously don’t,” Dean interrupted dryly. “Since you’re the one that I got, huh? So, seems to me you must be _exactly_ the truemate I’m supposed to have.”

“They do say it’s a profound bond,” Castiel agreed hopefully. “Two halves joining together to complete a whole.”

“And nobody’s perfect,” Dean continued, the side of his mouth quirking with a grin. “So maybe the person destined to ‘complete’ me was always going to have to have a few flaws, otherwise I’d be insufferably wonderful.”

“You are,” Castiel said.

“Insufferable?”

“Wonderful.”

“Oh,” Dean said, deflating a little and looking slightly lost. Unable to deflect Castiel’s heartfelt comment with humor, he appeared disarmed and vulnerable once more. “So…um…what now?”

“I think this is the point where you kiss me,” Castiel suggested hopefully.

Dean cautiously swam into the cave, then paused and licked his lips nervously, “Ah, yes… um… that…But… um… what if….”

And Castiel hated the hesitation on Dean’s face. The worry he wasn’t going to be enough. The almost palpable fear that, yet again, Castiel would kiss him only to declare it was a mistake and that he wasn’t the right one after all.

It was his fault that dark shadow was lurking in Dean’s eyes. His fault that Dean’s heart was as fragile as a cracked shell, held together by nothing more than hope and a prayer. His fault that such a strong and brave and noble Mer was almost flinching at the idea of being touched by his truemate lest he, yet again, was hurt beyond all imagining.

Castiel needed to know all the details of what had happened to Dean during his absence. Needed to know what had driven Dean to abandon the family he adored and leave Atlan in search of his father’s people. Needed to know, exactly, the weight and measure of every single individual hurt his leaving had inflicted on Dean’s fragile heart, so that he could spend the rest of his life carefully weaving a spell of healing over every tiny crack, until one day those green eyes would have no lurking shadows and that beloved mouth no longer smiled or joked to cover remembered pain.

But not today.

Today was not the day for memories.

Today was the day of a new beginning.

A new hope. A fresh start. A friendship rekindled. A love reborn.

And since it was _he_ who had shattered everything, it was _his_ responsibility to put things right.

To finally be the one who made the first move.

So it was Castiel who broke the deadlock, surging forwards through the cave to throw his arms around Dean and this time, this second kiss, wasn’t the awkward fumble of two nervous younglings. A year and several lifetimes had passed since his stone activated. Neither of them were pups any more.

This time the kiss was urgent, desperate, a plea for forgiveness, a demand of two souls that should never have been parted that they should reunite and become whole once more.

This time, as their tails entwined and their lips met, there was no hesitation. There was nothing but a blaze of heat and energy rising in Castiel’s chest and erupting outwards with the power of a tsunami, flowing into Dean, through his lips, through his skin, as though his soul itself was attempting to claw its way out of his body and burrow inside of Dean’s.

It seemed to pour out of him like water, the essence of himself seeping into Dean’s flesh, coloring it with everything that he was, everything that he hoped, that he dreamed, singing into Dean’s skin a song of love, of want, of need.

And it was blue, so blue, the blue of clear seas and summer skies. Blue, blue, and he could see it on Dean’s skin, see its glowing bioluminescence shining in the whites of Dean’s eyes, like azure fire, as he pressed inside him, thrusting harder, pushing and pressing, sliding skin on skin as he gifted Dean with all that he was, all he had ever been, all he might ever be. His hopes, his fears, his dreams, his nightmares, all of it, everything.

This is me, his soul sang. This is all of me. Take it. This is yours. Always yours. Forever yours.

And then, Dean’s soul answered.

And it was red, red, red, like volcanic fire, blasting, burning, blazing as it enveloped him with eager, greedy hunger. Searing into him with a howling scream of need, of want, of love and loss, of heartbreak and forgiveness. Forgiveness. So much forgiveness.

“Ohhh,” Castiel gasped, as the red wave passed into him, filling every tiny, empty, crevice inside him with its warm, wonderful, forgiving fire. “Oh. Oh. Oh.” And it was red, red, red, and it was Dean, Dean, Dean, and the fire seared through his veins, pulsing into his heart, burrowing deep, nesting so deeply inside him that it could never be dislodged.

Then the blue and the red bled together, meshed, blended, as their souls curled into each other, seeking home, and the glow behind Dean’s emerald eyes changed from blue to violet and then faded completely as their souls settled and became one.

Truemates.

They _were_ truemates.

Castiel didn’t even realize he had still doubted it at all, but he must have, somewhere deep inside, because the relief he felt was staggering as those lurking doubts were swept away entirely by the magical, visible evidence of their now-entwined souls.

“Truemates,” he breathed, into Dean’s beloved mouth, sinking into the clutching embrace of Dean’s arms. He felt his heart soar and take flight even as their tangled tails dragged them down towards the base of the cave.

“Ow,” he said as his shoulder blades hit a pile of stacked packs, sending them tumbling to the floor, and then he landed on top of them with a grunt with Dean’s weight pressed down on top of him.

And Dean, sparkling eyes emerald once more, now that their mended, melded souls had settled into place, threw his head back and laughed, the sound deeply joyous. “Serves you right,” he said. “Only you would think it was a good idea to complete a truemate bond in a cave full of provisions.”

“They were meant to be my dowry to you,” Castiel snorted, the idea suddenly striking him as ridiculous. Still, with an attempt at dignity, he added snootily, “You wouldn’t understand. It’s a _prince_ thing.”

“The _people_ don’t believe in royalty,” Dean pointed out, with a smirk. “You aren’t a prince _here_. But that’s okay. All things considered, I think I’d rather be able to tell everyone my truemate is named _Singer_ Castiel, anyway.”

“Just as well we’re staying down South then,” Castiel grinned. “Because, under Atlan law, I think you just became my _princess_ , Dean.”

As Dean blinked in horrified shock at the notion, Castiel’s own laughter was so loud it reverberated throughout the entire camp.

And, somewhere, Destiny smiled.


End file.
